At the General Assembly of Aosdána, last Wednesday, Director Pat Murphy was elected as a new member. Aosdána honours those artists who have distinguished themselves by the excellence of their art and whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland.
Ms Murphy, who currently sits of the board of the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland, the new representative body for directors here in Ireland, has had a long and distinguished career as a filmmaker.
She joins fellow filmmakers and Screen Directors Guild of Ireland members Neil Jordan, Bob Quinn, Cathal Black, Joe Comerford, and Louis Marcus in Aosdánas’ prestigious affiliation of creative artists.
Born in Dublin she went to Art College in Belfast, then Hornsey and the Royal College of Art Film School in London. In 1977, she was awarded a scholarship to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme New York, where she lived until she began work 'Maeve' (1981) her first feature.
Prior to this, she made a short film, 'Rituals of Memory'. Her second feature 'Anne Devlin' won the Arts Council Film Script Award and represented Ireland at a number of international festivals, including Edinburgh, Moscow, Chicago, Toronto and London. In 1988 she wrote and co-directed a two-part documentary entitled 'Sean MacBride Remembers' and in the following year, both devised and directed two theatrical events 'The Parade of Innocence' and 'The River Parade'. In 1993 Pat co-directed 'Reflections from the Roof of the World' and since then has collaborated with the Irish Film Centre and the Irish Museum of Modern Art on a number of interrelated projects, including 'From Beyond the Pale' and 'The Event Horizon'. In 1999 she made the film 'Nora' for which she was given the United International Pictures Director's Award. In 2002, she made a shortshort entitled 'What Miro Saw'.