2016 Press Releases
Virginia Teehan appointed to NMI board
Virginia Teehan, Director of Cultural Projects at University College Cork, has been appointed to the new board of the National Museum of Ireland (NMI).
The Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys, announced the new appointees, nominating Catherine Heaney as Chair designate.
The board members are Virginia Teehan, John Bowen, Mary Crotty, Catherine Heaney (Chair designate), Ambrose Loughlin, Judith McCarthy, Denise Moroney, Declan Nelson, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Andrew Power, Lynn Scarff and Aidan Walsh.
The following board members appointed by the Minister are nominees of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) and a staff representative from the NMI: Ingrid Hook (RDS), Kathleen James-Chakraborty (RIA), Mary O’Dowd (RIA), and Karen Wilson (NMI).
“I feel honoured to have been appointed by Minister Humphreys to the Board of the National Museum of Ireland. The collections at the NMI are hugely significant internationally. I look forward to working with the Director and staff in supporting the stewardship of these extraordinary resources and making them increasingly accessible to new audiences,” commented Virginia Teehan, Director of Cultural Projects, UCC.
Teehan’s scholarly interests are in the fine and decorative arts with special interest in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, an area in which she has published works. She is currently co-curating the exhibition The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish, which opened at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College in February 2016.
She has worked in in the cultural sector for over 25 years and developed the first Irish institutional university archives service in the 1990s. In 1999, as Director of Heritage and Visual Arts she was charged with driving the curatorial brief for the Glucksman Gallery, a €13million (privately-funded) project. In 2003 she joined the Hunt Museum as its Director before returning to UCC in late 2009 in her current role.
Teehan worked as project leader on the documentary film The Genius of George Boole, screened by RTÉ on September 1, 2015 and she has coordinated with internationally-based colleagues to host screenings in major centres, including the UN Headquarters, New York (October 2015), the Frequency Digital Film Festival (Lincoln, UK, October 2015), the London Irish Film Festival, (October 2015), and the Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley (November 2015), with further screenings planned in Asia (Shanghai, Singapore, Bangkok).
“The NMI is a key constituent in the Irish cultural landscape; securing its future orientation and that of the collections in its care is a great privilege,” Teehan added.