Film artist, Treasa O’Brien, is an award-winning artist and filmmaker. Her artworks and films have been screened internationally in festivals, social spaces and art galleries including at the Berlinale, the BFI London Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, Dublin International Film Festival, Athens Ethnographic Festival, Via Farini Milan, and at events in New York, Palestine, Australia, Mexico, France, Turkey and Iceland. Her most ambitious project, Town of Strangers (2019), an experimental non-narrative feature film, was funded by an Arts Council Film Project Award (2017) with support also from Clare County Council. Town of Strangers has screened at several film festivals, including Galway Film Fleadh, Cork Film Festival, Flying Broom in Turkey, The Icelandic Feminist Film Festival, and is being released online on the IFI@ Home platform as a new release in March 2021. She was artist in residency in Galway Art Centre in 2019 where she collaborated with the NUIG Astronomy Department for a film installation as part of Galway International Arts Festival. During this residency she made an installation film Memoirs of a Spacemother: An Astropoetic Sci Fi Essay Film, a ceiling projection viewed from hammocks, and with an outside chamber reading room with books and sculptures. Memoirs was edited into a linear version in 2020 that has screened in London and Canterbury and Dublin events. Her short experimental ethnofiction film The Blow-in (2016), has screened in multiple film festivals internationally and will be showing as an installation in the Glucksman Gallery HOME exhibition in 2021. She participated in the online exhibition Home from Home in 2020, for which she made a new sound artwork called Covid Dreams: Collective Unconscious in Confinement. She made a new short experimental film in 2020 relating to language and being a solo parent in the pandemic, called Measures Extended (Flattening the C-Word) which was premiered in an exhibition with mink (moving image network Kerry) artists, in collaboration with aemi (artists experimental moving image) in Sept 2020. She has received awards from The Arts Council of Ireland, CREATE, Screen Ireland, The Goethe Institute, Clare County Council Creating Space Award amongst others. She has developed film projects through selection for Euroconnection at Claremont Fermond, ESoDoc, Screen Talent Europe’s Galway Stories, Screen Ireland’ Catalyst scheme and was a participant of Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. She studied Fine Art in Limerick School of Art & Design (B.A Hons), Fiction Film Directing (M.A. with Distinction) at Goldsmiths London and has a PhD in Film Practice from University of Westminster, during which she made Town of Strangers, with Joshua Oppenheimer (dir. The Act of Killing) as her supervisor. She sometimes makes collaborative and participative projects with individuals and communities as well as her solo authored work. She also writes, curates and teaches about art and experimental film. She is a founding member of the feminist performance art collective Speaking of IMELDA.
