aemi announces ‘Developing Your Practice as a Film Artist’ TIER 2 Participants 2025-2026
Published date: 15 Aug 2025
aemi is thrilled to announce Thomas Bennett, Aoife Carolan, Michael Dignam, Laura Fitzgerald, Uma Magal, Olivia Normile, Erik Nuding, Richie Price and Dawn Richardson as the 2025-2026 TIER 2 Artist Support Programme participants.
In 2025 the number of applicants for this programme again, far exceeded our expectations. Out of the total applications received, 20 of these were shortlisted. The final decision making then was determined with the support of our external assessor Peter Taylor (of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival). A total of 9 film artists were then selected to form this year’s intake of the Developing Your Practice as a Film Artist (TIER 2) programme.
We were incredibly impressed with the applications; particularly those of the 9 selected artists, and very much look forward to working with the group as part of our new TIER 2 Artist Support Programme throughout 2025 into 2026.
Nestled between fact and fiction, Thomas Bennett’s work employs Hi-8 Tape and Super 8 to interrogate the ‘facets of perspective’ through the moving-image. Living and working in Belfast, Thomas‘s films have shown across Ireland including Dublin International FF and Belfast International FF, his latest Hi-8 short film ‘Gabriel’s Trumpet’ is to be released autumn 2025. Alienation, myth and a lurking comedy of menace form the basis of this latest work.
Aoife Carolan is a film artist and editor. Currently, she makes digital films with her phone that are about nature, consumption and self.
Michael Dignam is a Dublin-based artist working with moving image, sound, photography, and archival material. His work explores shifting ideas of class, labour, and belonging, often responding to fractured histories and speculative futures. Through layered, research-led projects, he investigates how identities are shaped by the changing dynamics of space, power, and collective memory.
Laura Fitzgerald is a visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, animation, text and audio. She is graduate of both the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and Royal College of Art, London. She received a Markievicz Award in 2024 and a Golden Fleece award in 2020.
Recent exhibitions include: Labour of Love, The Glucksman Gallery; Staying with the trouble, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Car Wheels Going Around, with Lorna Corrigan at KCAT Art Centre.
Uma Magal is the owner of Fenugreek Productions, a boutique studio for media and film work & training. She has a B.A. from Lady Shriram College, Delhi, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad and an M.A. in Communication from the Mass Communication Research Centre, J. M. I., Delhi.
During her years in the U.S.A. she earned an M.F.A in film production from Temple University, produced a PBS weekly series, “News 6”, with 6th grade schoolchildren, taught film and media at San Francisco State and Temple Universities and served on the boards of Asian Arts Initiative and Independent Film and Video Association in Philadelphia. She worked with the Scribe Video Centre to teach media literacy and the use of video as an empowering tool, particularly for disenfranchised communities.
Olivia Normile is an artist exploring language, communication, and perception through animation, installation, and experimental film. Through deconstructing film, drawing, and sculptural making, her work revolves around the notion of interruption and disruption in relation
to speech and movement. Slow-making, repetition, and interludes feature prominently throughout, laying bare material elements, labour, and overlooked narratives.
Recent awards include; Platform Commission, 41st EVA International (2025), South Dublin County Council Individual Artist Bursary (2025), Digital Media Practice Award, Firestation Artists’ Studios (2024), Arts Council Agility Award (2024, 2022, 2021). Recent exhibitions
include; Dog-Eared Paradise, screen service, 2023, Matters of Table, Periphery Space, 2023, Remembering The Future, VISUAL Carlow, 2023, Deliverables, Pallas Projects/Studios, Artist Initiated Projects, 2022.
Erik Nuding is non-fiction and hybrid filmmaker who creates ecologically minded work through long term cross-cultural collaborations, bringing together slow cinema and sensory ethnography as a means to explore multispecies relations. His first feature film in production, With Their Backs To The Sky, immerses into the entangled lives of bat catchers, scientists and old world fruit bats in the depleted forest of Madagascar. His films have screened at Visions Du Reel, Docs Ireland and Fid Marseille among others with support from Sundance, Sandbox films and the Buffett Institute for Climate Crisis Media.
Richie Price works with sound and image and is particularly interested in generative art and creatively exploring visual and audio feedback techniques. His work with AEMI will take the form of practice-based research related to Henri Bergson’s philosophy.
Dawn Richardson (Belfast, N. Ireland) is an artist working at the intersection of experimental documentary, immersive technology, and socially engaged practice. Through co-creation vehicle Hosta Projects, their work seeks to decentralise authorship and foreground decolonial approaches to storytelling and sound-making, as acts of cultural dissent.
Their broader practice interrogates technocratic power, narrative legitimacy and psychogeography. They are currently writing a paper on lunar cultural policy through the lens of CoFuturisms, and is developing a new body of work mapping migrant worker communities in Mid-Ulster through immersive, field-based methodologies.
Their practice is supported by Future Screens NI, NI Screen, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. They are a member of Digital Arts Studios Belfast (DAS).
Pictured in group photo below, back row from left to right aemi Co-Director Alice Butler, Uma Magal, Laura Fitzgerald, Aoife Carolan, Michael Dignam, Dawn Richardson, and aemi Co-Director Daniel Fitzpatrick, seated in front row from left to right: Olivia Normile, Richie Price and Erik Nuding
