Lianne O’Shea announced as the 2025 Marie Mullen Bursary recipient
1 May 2025
Lianne O'Shea, the 2025 recipient of Druid's Marie Mullen Bursary, inside The Mick Lally Theatre on Druid Lane, photo by Anita Murphy.
Director Lianne O’Shea has been announced as the 2025 recipient of the Marie Mullen Bursary.
Druid has announced director Lianne O’Shea as the 2025 recipient of the Marie Mullen Bursary, an annual award for women working on the island of Ireland as theatre artists in the fields of design, directing and dramaturgy.
Lianne is a director whose most recent work includes PLAY, an intimate site-responsive exploration of Hamlet. This multidisciplinary presentation was made in collaboration with the community drama group resident in the Moat Theatre for the last 70 years and wove their recorded testimony into the performance by a professional cast. In 2022 she presented an earlier strand of her Hamlet exploration, This House is Elsinore, another immersive work which looked at the challenges of the actor in the shadow of a seminal role.
In 2024 she was a Resident Director at the Abbey Theatre, assisting Lynne Parker on her production of Children of the Sun on the Abbey stage. Lianne also recently directed a showing of short plays on the Peacock stage at the Abbey Theatre as part of the Fighting Words Playwriting Programme.
Lianne obtained a Master’s degree in Directing for Theatre from UCD where her research focused on collaborative rehearsal systems and Shakespeare. As part of her practice, she makes use of Bogart’s Viewpoints and is currently researching the interface of spontaneity, liveness and indeterminacy in her work with best practice around contact, intimacy and presentation of violence on stage.
Her previous directing credits include Foreign Bodies (Project Arts Centre) and Delta Phase (Theatre Upstairs), Skullduggery (Bewley’s Café Theatre), Romeo + Juliet and The Merchant of Venice (The Complex).
Named in honour of actor and Druid co-founder, Marie Mullen, and now in its seventh year, the Marie Mullen Bursary addresses the historic imbalance of female representation in theatre and supports the professional development of women in Irish theatre. The bursary provides a female theatre artist with the time, physical resources and mentoring necessary to support their work.
Lianne will have multiple paid work opportunities with Druid over the coming year including the role of Assistant Director on Druid’s double bill of Riders to the Sea by J. M. Synge and Macbeth by William Shakespeare. She will also receive a stipend, mentoring, access to workshops and Druid’s other development programmes such as FUEL and Druid Debuts.
Introduced in 2018, the Marie Mullen Bursary is one of Druid’s theatre development programmes and offers:
- A residency with Druid on a company production
- A one-to-one session with Marie Mullen on working in the theatre industry
- Mentoring opportunities with theatre professionals
- For directors and dramaturgs, a contract to act as dramaturg or director for a Druid Debut
- Opportunities to engage with the Druid Ensemble
- Opportunities to attend FUEL and Druid Academy workshops and events
- A bursary award of €2,000
Previous recipients of the Marie Mullen Bursary
- 2018-2019: Eleanor White, dramaturg
- 2019-2020: Clíodhna Hallissey, costume designer
- 2020-2021: Emily Foran, director and Sarah Baxter, director
- 2022: Katie O'Halloran, director
- 2023: Suzie Cummins, lighting designer
- 2024: Martha Knight, sound designer and composer
The Marie Mullen Bursary is supported by Thomas Campbell Jackson & Penny Jackson, and the Brandt Jackson Foundation.