Announcement of Fingal County Council Arts Office, Age & Opportunity and Tyrone Guthrie Centre 2025 residency award recipients
Fingal County Council Arts Office in partnership with Age & Opportunity and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre are delighted to announce the 2025 two recipients of the residency award.
This year’s awardees are multimedia visual artist Beata Piekarska Daly and writer, photographer and director Lorna Fitzsimons.
This residency award offers a professional visual artist and a professional writer over the age of 50+ the opportunity to research or develop new work. These residencies aim to celebrate and support older artists at all stages of their careers working in literature and visual arts. Recipients will receive two separate 2-week long residencies (1 month total per artist) including a small stipend. The residency will take place between July and December 2025.
Fingal County Council Arts Officer Sarah O’Neil commented ‘We are delighted to announce Beata and Lorna as the 2025 recipients of the Age & Opportunity and Tyrone Guthrie Centre residency award. This residency offers Fingal Artists an opportunity to connect with national, and international artists across all art forms. It also offers time away, space to work, and opportunities for collaboration and networking which facilitates the development of their practice.’
Arts Programme Manager at Age & Opportunity, Dr. Tara Byrne also commented ‘Fingal has such a strong artistic heritage, and we feel it's vitally important to support and champion its contemporary artists of 50+’.
The residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, located in the beautiful, tranquil setting of County Monaghan will provide an ideal environment to focus on research or the development of new work.
About the artists
Lorna Fitzsimons
Lorna Fitzsimons is a photographer, writer and director with academic qualifications in Photography, Screenwriting, and Digital Feature Film Production. Her visually driven, socially conscious films have been supported by Screen Ireland, FilmOffaly, Engine Shorts, and Árdán/RTÉ, and screened at festivals including Galway Film Fleadh, Foyle Film Festival, Aesthetica, Kort FIlm Festival and 16 Days/16 Films, Human Rights Touring Festival. She was a mentee of Emmy-winning director Dearbhla Walsh and a director in the Factory Actors Studio.
Her feature credits include co-directing Poison Pen (Amazon Prime) and writing/directing indie film Meeting on the Stairs. She has developed her screenwriting through Cine Qua Non Screenwriting Lab, Mexico, Script Circle Berlin, and Screen Ireland’s Big Stories on the Small Screen, and shadowed directors on Sherlock and Daughter and Red Rock through the National Talent Academy. Recent work include directing short films Whale, now in feature development with Screen Ireland, and Remote Strutting, which has been sold for world wide distribution. Her short screenplay Locked and Loaded won the script reading competition at Dublin International Comedy Film Festival. She won Best Director at the European Cinematographer Awards 2024 and was shortlisted for Best Director at the 2025 Shark Awards for her short film #bog.
Beata Piekarska Daly
Beata Piekarska Daly is an award-winning painter and multimedia artist. The Polish born, Irish based artist focuses on experimenting with paint and extending the language of abstraction. She has developed a fluid, painterly approach that mimics the way of thinking, the flux of emotions, thoughts, and life. Exploring the fluidity that underpins the dynamic tension between organic forms and technological precision, Beata constructs site-sensitive artworks that evolve through performance, bio-sculptures, and video. Beata is an artist whose practice navigates the intersections of social and environmental consciousness through participatory methods.
Previous shows include: PainThING (2022) at Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin. Supported by Fingal County Council, the solo project was based on symbiosis with architecture and the human environment. OVER NATURE (2019-2021) group show that travelled across the island of Ireland: Limavady, RCC Letterkenny, Ennistymon, Cork and Dublin. In 2021 she was one of the finalists of International Art Rights Prize, Video category. 2019 she won the 1st Prize in Painting Category and the Grand Prize winner during Polska-Eire Festival, Gorey, Ireland.
Beata was born in Silesia, Poland and grew up in a state-owned farming collective. She is a first-generation college graduate with an Art Education Degree from the University of Zielona Gora, as well as a History of Art Degree from Trinity College, Dublin.
About Age & Opportunity
Age & Opportunity is the national organisation that provides a range of opportunities for older people who want to get more involved in arts and culture, sport and physical activity, civic engagement and personal development.
Specifically, the Arts programme aims to support and provide resources for artists, arts participants/audiences and arts organisations. This is done through the annual Bealtaine Festival, which is Ireland’s month-long (May) national festival celebrating the arts and creativity as we age and the Resource and Development Programme.
About the Tyrone Guthrie Centre
Based in rural County Monaghan, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is a cross-border organisation that offers time away, space to work, and opportunities for collaboration and networking for artists and ‘other like persons’ that facilitates the development of their practice across all art forms. Annaghmakerrig House, otherwise known as the ‘Big House’, is situated in the quiet countryside of County Monaghan, and together with the self-catering cottages, studios and performance spaces, as well as the lake and forests, gardens, and fields, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is a place where creativity flourishes amid the many pressures and distractions of contemporary life.
For more information, please see:
www.fingalarts.ie
www.fingal.ie/arts
www.bealtaine.ie