GSA Board
Joe Dowling - Founder
Joe Dowling is the Director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has been former Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, Managing Director of the Gaiety Theatre and founder of the Gaiety School of Acting, of which he was Chairman until 2011. He has directed plays in all major Irish theatres and also in London, New York, Washington, Montreal and the Banff Festival of the Arts, Alberta.
Prof. Christopher Murray – Chairman
Christopher Murray, born in Galway, as a student acted in Dramsoc at NUIG and after that in the Taibhdhearc for a few years while teaching at NUIG. He studied History of Theatre on a Fellowship to Yale University, where he took his PhD. He has taught at UCD for almost 40 years, where he co-founded the Drama Centre in 1990 and formed an exchange of courses with GSA. He is proud to have been a member of the board of GSA since 1996. He has written extensively on Irish drama.
Catherine Donnelly
Catherine Donnelly has worked as a writer in advertising for many years. Her first novel, The State of Grace was published some years ago and she is currently working on a new one. She was chairperson of Rough Magic for 12 years and is now an associate member of the company.
Patrick Laffan
As a member of the Abbey Theatre Company in the sixties and seventies, Pat Laffan performed in many plays, old and new, from the Abbey repertoire. For most of the seventies he was director of the Peacock Theatre and directed in the Gate Theatre from 1979 to 1982. His performances in films include The Queen, Intermission, The Snapper and The General.
Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy
Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy is a writer, director and teacher of drama. She was founder and director of the Storytellers Theatre Company, for which she has written and adapted many plays, performed in major theatres throughout Ireland. Mary Elizabeth teaches in the TISCH Dublin Summer Program for NYU, and on the Drama Studies post-graduate degree courses in UCD and in NUIG.
Patrick Sutton
Patrick Sutton is the Director of The Gaiety School of Acting. He is currently a former Government appointee to the board of The Irish Museum of Modern Art, and a board member of the Storytellers Theatre Company, The Project Arts Centre, The Lisa Richards Actors agency, The Arts for Peace Foundation and The Smock Alley Theatre. He is also the Director of COMMUNICATE, a communications company working at a senior level in politics, industry and the arts.
Tony O'Dalaigh
Tony O Dalaigh is an Arts Consultant and a board member of St Patrick's Festival and the Irish Romanian Cultural Foundation. He was the manager of An Damer from 1963-1965, general administrator of the Irish Theatre Company from 1974 to 1978, and director of Dublin Theatre Festival 1990 to 1999.
Donal Shiels
Donal Shiels has worked in the arts in Ireland and abroad for more than twenty years as a producer and promoter of theatre, opera, music and dance.
He has also managed the China / Ireland Cultural Exchange on behalf of the Department of Arts, Sport & Tourism, and been Chief Executive of St Patrick’s Festival – the largest annual event in Ireland, and headed the festival for five years.
More recently he has been Executive Producer with Lane Productions, and currently runs Verdant Productions and continues to produce a mixture of music, drama and comedy.
He is also a board member of Druid Theatre and The James Joyce Centre
