Sinead McDonald is a Dublin based artist and media lecturer, based in the Media and Fine Art departments at the Technological University, Dublin. Her research and practice focuses on developing new methods and methodologies to explore and interrogate intra-disciplinary practice. She works at the nexus of art, engineering, science, and the body; her doctoral research explores the materiality of the body as a site of knowledge-making, and the interrogation of its epistemic, biological, technological, and intra-species alliances and entanglements. Her research trajectories are heavily influenced by feminist new materialist philosophy, animal studies, critical posthumanism, composting-with-care, and queer theory.
She is a founder member of Future Makers Collective, a lead researcher with the RASL Exploring Transdisciplinary Education combining Arts & Sciences Erasmus+ project where she helped develop the Tuning Transdisciplinary Education project. She is a core member of the European Culture and Technology Lab+ at the European University of Technology where she explores the roles of embodiment, storytelling, speculative fiction, intraspecies alliances, and onto-epistemology in critical posthumanist, post-anthropocentric models of research and education.
A graduate of the Art in the Digital World Fine Art Masters at N.C.A.D., she is currently working towards a fine art PhD. Her practice incorporates new technologies; digital production, web based art and physical computing, alongside photography, microscopy, video, sound art, and historical lens-based processes. She is most interested in how technologies and sciences old and new affect and challenge our perceptions, allow us to tell stories, and, ultimately, explore our needs, desires, and yearnings.
She is an active member of Tog Hackerspace, Dublin, where she sometimes makes odd things, and is a regular performer/contributor at Hack Circus.