About

Maeve is a director / writer for film and theatre whose work responds to issues of climate breakdown, and revisits the canon with a feminist lens.

She is lead artist for axis Ballymun’s Green Arts Department facilitating a series of events that reach out into the community and raise awareness of Green Issues. In 2024 this includes Rising Tide Ballymun/Belfast, a crossborder project that focuses on the hopes of young people in building towards a more hopeful future, Art Made By Walking; a commission art project that centres walking as an art practice with Lian Bell, Shanna May Breen and Veronica Dyas and will culminate in an exhibition at Axis through winter 2024, and a community art project called ‘Orchard Songlines’ that will bring together young people and elders to create songs that will attach their observations of what their community needs to an urban orchard with poet Jessica Traynor and Composer Tom Lane offering workshop masterclasses through the process.

She was artivist-in-residence with Project Arts Centre through 2022/2023, editing a limited run publication called “How Do We Start?”, providing mentorship through RHIZOME and facilitating a pilot project called Roots For The Future, a radical climate thinking group for and by artists. Sinead Curran, Eileen Hutton, Vanya Lambrecht-Ward and Rosie O’Reilly are the four artists who have been engaged since the beginning and the project has now evolved to focus on the idea of a Climate Art Assembly in the model of a citizens assembly. It is currently in development as part of an Invitation to Collaboration award with Wexford Arts Office as lead partner. Experts Prof Karen Till, Dr Cian O’Donovan, Dr Kathleen Lynch and Dr Jennifer McElwain have been key mentors through the process.

In 2021 she is co-founded a film and media company called Cracking Light Productions with her partner Alex Gill. Looking for moments that capture something true, sometimes messy and sometimes composed, these projects are always focused on building connections. In 2024 they are producing projects across the country including The Time Machine; an immersive installation in Miltown Malbay in August 2024 with support from Creative Ireland, Acts of Hope; a youth programme delivered in partnership with The Everyman, Cork, and Seachain an Bhearna; a short film development with youth activists Arianne Mallari and Nakai Mudiwa.

From September 2019 - March 2021 Maeve was the embedded artist for a European Cultural Adaptation project which asked “What is the role of the artists in Climate Adaptation” working work with Codema (the energy agency for Dublin) and Axis Ballymun.

She worked as a resident Assistant Director at The Abbey Theatre in 2012 before becoming the first Associate Director with Pan Pan Theatre Company. She lectured in Trinity College Drama and Theatre Department for four years teaching the Principles of Directing.

In film Maeve completed her second short film The Last Harvest which included a pilot in sustainable short film making supported by Creative Ireland and Clare County Council. The film has screened at Fastnet Film Festival 2024. She was awarded Screen Ireland’s position as shadow director October 2018 on Wildfire - upcoming debut from Cathy Brady. In June 2019 she shot her first short film The House Fell which premiered at Cork Film Festival and was selected by Fastnet Festival, Kerry International Film Festival, The Richard Harris International Film Festival and Achill Island Film Festival.

In theatre most recently she composed original music for The Wrens by Dan Colley. In 2019 she wrote and co-directed an interdisciplinary work called Bodies of Water with Eoghan Carrick, visual artist Jonah King and artist Una Kavanagh, UNWOMAN Part III with radical feminist theatre company THE RABBLE (Australia), The Mouth of a Shark – a song cycle about migration – with Change of Address and THE SHITSTORM: a riot grrrl sequel to The Tempest, Abbey Theatre-Fringe Co-Production which debuted as part of Dublin Fringe at The Peacock September 2017.