MFA Fine Art - AD426

Educational Standard

All applicants are expected to present an approved Bachelor degree at minimum level of 2nd class honours (2.2)

Applicants who do not meet the minimum academic entry requirements may be considered on the basis of prior work or learning experience (RPEL). Candidates may be required to pass a qualifying examination set by the relevant department before being accepted to a Masters degree programme. Attendance at selected undergraduate lecture courses at NCAD, together with related written work may be prescribed. 

You may apply for the programme if you are currently completing your Undergraduate Degree. NCAD will review the rest of your application If necessary, we can make you a Conditional Offer. When your degree is completed and you send us final transcripts we will upgrade this to a Full Offer. 

Essential Supporting Documents 

• A Statement of Interest - 500 words framing your reasons for applying to the programme. Please indicate a subject/discipline area that you believe can best advance your practice.   
• A recent CV
• Certified transcripts of previous programmes followed
• Certified copies of degree/ certificates and/or other appropriate third level qualifications bearing the official stamp of the institution.
• Reference 1 (Academic - Head of School/Department preferred)
  • Some referees prefer to submit the reference directly to the college. If this is the case, please instruct your referee to email a standard reference to postgraduate@ncad.ie.
  • Please make sure all references contain the letterhead and the institution contact email address for the referee.
• Reference 2 (Tutor or Current/Recent Employer)

Portfolio 

• Applications for Fine Art programmes must be supported by visual or other documentation that best represents your practice.
• Applicants are requested to upload a document via the online application which contains a link to an online portfolio or to a portfolio* folder on Google Drive. The portfolio / folder should contain 10-15 images maximum.
• Weblinks to Vimeo or YouTube should be submitted for viewing video clips. Clips should be no longer than 10 minutes. Clear titles, sizes, dates, media, dimensions and contextualisation of the imagery must accompany your submission on an Image Description Sheet.
• Links to artists' websites, online galleries, or other online art sites will not be accepted as a portfolio. Failure to submit a 10 to 15 piece portfolio will render your application incomplete.

Document Description

When uploading documents please make sure you clearly label them using the Description Box like in the example below 

English Language Requirements

All programmes in NCAD are taught through English. International Applicants are asked to provide proof of their English Language Proficiency.

Full details of acceptable tests and the standard required can be found at the following link English Language Requirement.

After Your Degree

An MFA qualification is generally accepted as a prerequisite for further professional development in art and related fields. The alumni of the MFA at NCAD have gone on to pursue a variety of careers as artists, curators, academics, doctoral researchers and entrepreneurial arts professionals in expanded fields. Ireland has a vibrant visual arts sector that embraces contemporary art museums, formal gallery spaces, private galleries, artist initiated/artist run spaces.

Dublin is home to a smart, dynamic, curious, friendly and youthful population that contributes to its reputation as an active, engaging and outward-looking European city. Irish culture has an international profile across the arts in literature, music, film, theatre, visual art and architecture that combines rich traditions with youthful risk taking innovation.

Fees

For information on tuition fees please follow this Link 

There is an application fee of €55.00*

Apply 

Step 1: Click on Apply Now button below | Step 2: Fill in your details

Step 3: Upload your Supporting Documents

• You can also submit your application even before you upload the necessary documents. 

• You can not add new documents after you have submitted. 

• Additional documents can be sent to postgraduate@ncad.ie and we will upload them on your behalf. 

Step 4: Pay the application fee & submit your application to NCAD*

• If you are applying for multiple Postgraduate Programmes then you are only obliged to pay the application fee once.

  • Complete your application as far as the fee payment page

  • Click save + exit

  • Email postgraduate@ncad.ie and let us know you are ready to submit and we will submit the application on your behalf. 

• NCAD Graduates are not required to pay the application fee. 

  • Complete your application as far as the fee payment page

  • Click save + exit 

  • Email postgraduate@ncad.ie and let us know you are ready to submit and we will submit the application on your behalf. 

Notes on Making Your Application

The priority deadline for receipt of applications to postgraduate programmes starting in January 2025 is 31st May 2024. Applications made by 14th of June are guaranteed to be reviewed by NCAD. If you apply after this date, we may not be in a position to review your application. 

Scholarships at the School of Fine Art

Continuing NCAD Graduates and Alumni will be eligible for a reduced tuition fee of €4,400 per academic year. (The normal fee rate is €5,700 per academic year.)

Programme Faculty

The MFA team, based within the School of Fine Art encompasses a wide variety of specialisms and skills across the field of contemporary art. These include painting, print, the moving image, object based, participatory and expanded forms of sculpture, performance, physical computing and art writing. It is their ongoing effort to resource their research, to develop and exhibit work and to be a part of contemporary debate in all its forms, that are understood as critical to contributing to an effective and informed teaching culture. The MFA Fine Art hosts a Studio Award scheme, for different international artists to contribute to the programme each year. 

For further information contact:

Dr Sarah Durcan - Programme Director

durcans@staff.ncad.ie

Dr Sarah Durcan is an artist and writer concerned with the intersection between subjective memory and historical events, her moving image works form speculative narratives often based on female experiences. Recent projects include The Invisibles [2023], a Platform Commission for the 40th EVA International Biennial, and book Memory and Intermediality in Artists’ Moving Image (2021) which addresses the preoccupation with memory in contemporary artists’ moving image installations. She is Programme Leader of the MFA Fine Art, National College of Art & Design, Dublin.

Brian Hand - Sculpture Pathway

handb@staff.ncad.ie

Brian Hand is an artist and educator. At NCAD he is Head of the Department of Sculpture and Expanded Practice and a core lecturer and tutor across all trimesters of the MA/MFA Art and Social Action. He has a deep interest in post-colonial historiography and the challenges of historical representation, his art practice is broadly concerned with creatively exploring and researching events in the past that can potentially disrupt a secure sense of the ‘present/future’, making temporary public work and time-based installations.

Feargal Fitzpatrick - Media Pathway

fitzpatrickp@staff.ncad.ie

Feargal Fitzpatrick is head of NCAD's Fine Art Media Department, where teaching and research activities ranges across photography, moving image, virtual & digital 3D spaces, physical computing strategies, performance and installation practices.Hisy current research project, 'Ireland, Landscape and Nineteenth-Century Photography', examines material that, up to now, has been dealt with largely on an empirical or canonical basis. The work is a critical-historical account of the relationships between photographic representations of place and Irish manifestations of colonialism, nationalism and capital. Through a contemporary theoretical framework (drawing on the work of Marx, Benjamin, Bhabha and Rancière), it argues that photography’s inception represents a rupture in visual culture – producing a crisis in the politics of representation – and that its consequences have been playing out through landscape imaging for 180 years. Implicated in this process are concepts of place, identity, nation and materiality – turning photographic meaning into something continually deferred, qualified and contingent on historiographical connections between images' moments of production and consumption.

 Mark O'Kelly - Painting Pathway

 okellym@staff.ncad.ie

Catríona Leahy - Print Pathway

leahyc@staff.ncad.ie

Catriona Leahy is an artist and educator based in Dublin. Leahy received her BA Fine Art from Crawford College of Art & Design and MA Print from The Royal College of Art in London. Before taking up position as Assistant Lecturer in Print at NCAD in January 2018 she held the position of Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Northampton (2013 – 2017), during which time she secured the Satander Staff Research Award to enable a research residency for herself and 4 MA students to the world-renowned Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. The residency resulted in the publication of a collaborative artists’ book, the original of which is housed in the TATE Britain Special Collections Library. She was Associate Lecturer at Winchester School of Art (2016 – 2017) and has acted as Visiting Lecturer to Camberwell College of Art, Manchester School of Art, Loughborough University and University of Central Lancaster. Leahy is currently a 3-year studio member at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios (2018-2021). She is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently Arts Council Ireland Visual Art Bursary (Strand I, Round II 2018). She works across print, sculpture and moving image.

  Helen McAllister - Applied Materials Pathway

   mcalisterh@staff.ncad.ie

 Helen McAllister’s practice is rooted in Embroidery, that now positions the materiality and process in the Applied Arts. The  practice has been a constant dialogue between the shoe–derived form, historical Venice, and the crafted artifact outcome. The  work investigates notions of the narrative, symbolism and metaphor that are interdisciplinary within the maker discipline,  through Design processes and thinking with that of Material Culture. The engagement with the viewer and the ‘display’ of the  made artifact propels the work in new contexts, having new audiences and new teaching situations.

Credit:Shoe by Helen McAllister

Professor Philip Napier: 

napierp@staff.ncad.ie

Professor Philip Napier is an artist and educator. Currently he is Head of the Fine Art Faculty at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Napier has worked through art practice in a variety of challenging environments, where a negotiation of the situation, as content, has had a significant bearing on the work engaged and produced. He has developed works within gallery contexts and through time based and permanently sited public projects. Napier works both individually and collaboratively. He is a former Rome scholar, and has represented Ireland at the XXII Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil, Great Britain at the inaugural Kwangju Biennial and Northern Ireland in the Montreal Biennial. He was the Integrated Arts Coordinator during the redevelopment of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. His most recent cycle of works and projects have been utilising a variety of specific visual ‘modules’ which explore dimensions of consumption, starvation, discovery and connection.

Admissions Team

Camille Rocca

postgraduate@ncad.ie