Simon Pereira Shorey, Chairman

Simon Pereira Shorey is a businessman and entrepreneur who has worked both sides of the Atlantic. As a business consultant his clients included British Gas, BP and the Duchy of Cornwall. His current responsibilities include representing throughout the USA the family consultancy ZP & Associados, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Simon, of Irish and Brazilian ancestry, serves on the Board of Advisors of the Irish Business Organization of New York, the board of the Northern Ireland Women's Initiative and the New York board of Boys Hope, Girls Hope.

Anita Daly, Public Relations

Anita Daly, President of Daly Communications, leads the premiere US full service Irish American marketing company. Anita has created many grass-roots promotional campaigns relevant and directed to this group of consumers. The leader in marketing Irish entertainment, Daly Communications has promoted the soundtrack for Riverdance, and a wide range of artists including Ronan Tynan, The Chieftains, Michael Flatley, The Saw Doctors, Black 47, Phil Coulter, Van Morrison, Finbar Furey and Colin Dunne.

William Harrington, Treasurer

William Harrington, son of Winnie Flaherty Harrington (Connemara) and Patrick Harrington (Kenmare) was born and raised in a household steeped in the Gaeltacht traditions. Because of this spirit of community, William (Liam, as he is sometimes called) has continued his family’s traditions through his involvement in the Irish American community. His family is involved in the Irish community in both New York (FDNY Emerald Society Pipes and Drums), Carpenter’s Union (Local 608) and in Washington D.C. (charter member St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee). In addition to his involvement with the Irish American Arts Awards, Liam sits on the board of directors of the New York Irish Centre as advisor to Father Colm Campbell.

William holds advanced degrees in both Finance and Accounting. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. Prior to entering the world of finance in college, William worked with his family as a carpenter and journeyman. William currently works in the Private Equity and Real Estate industries for Deloitte.

Kara Kennedy

Kara Kennedy, Director of External Affairs, Samford University School of Business, is a results oriented development and marketing professional with nearly two decades of experience in fundraising, public relations and marketing with nonprofit and political organizations. She has worked for a number of organizations in Alabama, Washington, DC and Atlanta, Georgia, on fundraising and marketing initiatives including: the American Red Cross National Headquarters, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the International Republican Institute. Her fundraising experience has enabled her work with a number of corporations across the United States. In 2006, while working in Atlanta, Georgia, she worked with the Gaffey Group on a tour of the Atlanta’s Beltline project for a Northern Ireland trade mission group. After moving to Birmingham, Alabama, her hometown, she established Kennedy Resource Development and worked with an International education and arts organization on their Spotlight on the Czech Republic events. Kennedy Resource Development again was asked to work with the Gaffey Group of Atlanta on the Alabama visit of John Bruton, European Union Ambassador to the United States. Ambassador Bruton’s itinerary included a visit to a high school, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a business breakfast with Samford Business School and a meeting with Governor Bob Riley. Kara is a Board member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Alabama Chapter and a member of the Birmingham Committee on Foreign Relations.

Attracta Lyndon

Attracta Lyndon is the Vice President, North America of Dooley Car Rentals, the premier car rental company in Ireland. Prior to launching the US reservations office for Dooley Car Rentals, Attracta worked in a variety of sales and marketing positions in Chicago for the Irish Tourist Board and the Bank of Ireland. Attracta is the current President of the Irish Business Organization of New York.

Antonia Reilly

Antonia Reilly is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Antonia's degree in Fashion Design brought her to work in Paris with Karl Lagerfeld and have her own designer collections in Tokyo before coming to New York in '98 where she has worked with such Fashion icons as Oscar De La Renta. Antonia is currently Creative Director of Cooltone Consulting Inc. Her clients include Lana Winer International and Saks Inc. Antonia's work in the Fashion industry in New York has been documented in the RTE series "Made in America - Inside the Rag Trade".

A member of the Irish Network NYC, Antonia is also Treasurer of the Cross Border Orchestra of Irelands New York Executive Committee and Director of 'Accepting Fashion', a non-profit organization created in 2005. Participating students, 8-13 yrs, from various schools, North and South of the border, create outfits from paper that can be painted, pleated, dyed, crushed, cut, stenciled, etc. and worn on stage in a catwalk style show. By 'Accepting Fashion' of different cultures and ethnic groups, young students learn to understand the relevance of acceptance and integration growing up and living in Irelands vibrant, multi cultural society.

Dr. Kathryn Primm

Dr. Kathryn Primm is the regional coordinator for the South Eastern United States. She is a doctor of veterinary medicine with her own thriving practice in Tennessee. Her family hails in part from Dublin.

Fiona Wenn

Fiona Venn is the regional coordinator for Australia and New Zealand.

Enrique Juncosa, Chairman

Born in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, Enrique Juncosa was Deputy Director of the prestigious Reina Sofia National Museum of Modern Art (MNCARS) in Madrid from 2000 until taking up the post of Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in February 2003.

Prior to his time at MNCARS, Enrique was Deputy Director of the highly-regarded Institute of Modern Art in Valencia (IVAM). From 1992 to 1998 he was visual art critic for El País, Spain’s most prestigious and largest-circulation daily newspaper. During this time he also worked as a freelance curator for shows by artists such as Barry Flanagan, Malcolm Morley and Miquel Barceló - in Spain and France and also in Germany, the UK and Norway. Enrique is the great-nephew of the famous Spanish Modernist painter Joan Miró and, since 1992, has been a trustee of the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation. He is also a noted poet, having had five books of poetry published in Spain.

Cheryl Donegan

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Cheryl Donegan had her first solo show in 1993, since when she has exhibited widely in Europe and in North America where she has defined a new generation of artists, many of whom are women, who engage in a new conceptual art practice. Her work integrates the time-based, gestural forms of performance and video with forms such as painting, drawing, and installation. Provocative and irreverent, her body-based, performative video works put a subversive spin on issues relating to sex, gender, art-making, art history, and pop culture.

Thomas McEvilley

Thomas McEvilley is a professor of Art History at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he heads the new department of Art Criticism and Writing. He is the author of dozens of books and monographs of art history, classical philology, and philosophy (including the monumental The Shape of Ancient Thought), and three novels (including North of Yesterday, published by McPherson in 1987). His art monographs include works on Julian Schnabel, Les Levine, Pat Steir, Ulay and Marina Abramovic, Janis Kounellis, and Bruce Conner. He appeared in two parts of the BBC television series "The State of the Art."

He has been a visiting professor at Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Grant in 1993 and has been awarded an NEA critic’s grant and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism by the College Art Association. Professor McEvilley has been a contributing editor of Artforum and has published hundreds of articles, catalogue essays, and reviews in the field of contemporary art, as well as monographs on Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, and Pat Steir. His recent books include Art and Discontent, Art and Otherness, and The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era. He lives in New York City.

Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland

Brian O'Doherty exhibits his work under the name Patrick Ireland "until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland." A pioneer in the Conceptual art movement, he has had over 40 one-person exhibitions in this country and Europe. Over 100 galleries and museums have included his work in group exhibitions.

His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, and is owned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin and the Hirshhorn Museum. It has been included in such international exhibitions as the Venice Biennale, Documenta and Rosc.

Film and television. O'Doherty has had a distinguished career in film and television. He wrote and directed the documentary "Hopper's Silence," about the artist Edward Hopper, which premiered at the New York Film Festival and won the Grand Prix at the Montreal International festival of Films on Art. He was the NBC-TV "Today" program's on-air arts reporter for five years in the 1970s. He has written specials for CBS, WNBC and PBS, and wrote and hosted two series, "Invitation to Art," for WGBH-TV, Boston, and "Dialogue," for WNBC-TV in New York.

For 19 years until 1996, he was director of film, radio and television programs at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he demonstrated his commitment to developing independent artists and organizations in film and video by initiating regional fellowships for film and video artists and an educational program for graduate students in the arts, the Arts Corps. Over the same period he developed and/or supported PBS series like "American Masters," "P.O.V.," "The Metropolitan (Opera) Presents," "Great Performances" and "American Cinema." As director of Millennium Projects, 1995/96, he encouraged the development of the Millennium Photographic Survey of the United States. During his tenure, Endowment-supported films and videos won numerous Academy Awards and Emmys.

Writing and criticism. O'Doherty also is well-known as a writer and critic. He was an art critic with the New York Times in the 1960s and Editor-in-Chief of Art in America from 1971 to 1974. His commentaries have appeared in The Times (London), The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, Life Magazine, the Yale Review, and Artforum.

Among his books are American Masters: The Voice and the Myth (Random House), Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Lapis Press), and a novel, The Strange Case of Mlle. P. (Pantheon), which has been translated into ten languages.

Since 1969 he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art History at Barnard College of Columbia University, teaching art writing and the art film. He is an extern examiner in sculpture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

He has lectured at the Whitney Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Chicago Art Institute, and as befits a one-time medical doctor, the New York Academy of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. He gave the Lowell Lectures at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Franklin Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas at Lawrence.

He has received the Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association, an award from the British Society of Authors (for "Mlle. P") and the Eire Society of Boston's Gold Medal for contributions to culture.

He is a member of the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the American-Irish Historical Society in New York (founded 1897), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Larry Powell

Larry Powell is a businessman and enthusiastic collector and supporter of Irish contemporary visual art, based himself in Northern Ireland. He is particularly interested in the work of John Kingerlee from West Cork.

Ronald Sosinski

Ronald Sosinski has been a fixture on the international art scene since opening his first gallery in New York, E. M. Donahue Gallery, with his business partner of 25 years Ellen Marie Donahue, in the historic East Village in 1984. The gallery rose to much acclaim in its Soho incarnation (1988-2000), specializing in mid-career abstract painting.

Presently in Chelsea, the gallery now known as The Proposition, continues to develop and present emerging talent under the directorship of Mr. Sosinski. Mr. Sosinski has been involved internationally in creating the Hermann Hesse Museum in Switzerland and was responsible for bringing the watercolors of Hermann Hesse to the U.S., for the time a historic show at the Soho gallery in 1998. He was also a founding member of the SCOPE international art fair.

William Zimmer

William Zimmer has been the leading art critic on the New York Times for a quarter of a century. Before then he worked on Arts Magazine and The Soho News. William Zimmer was the first critic to review Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Keith Haring and other burgeoning artists of the 1980's.

Colm Ó Briain

Colm Ó Briain was previously Director of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Policy Advisor to the Minister for Arts and Culture of the Irish Government between 1993 and 1997, Colm was the founding Chairman of the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. He has been a producer in Irish theatre and television and is currently Director of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.

Polly Devlin

Author, journalist, broadcaster, film-maker, art critic and conservationist, Polly Devlin has had a remarkable career, taking her far from her rural roots in County Tyrone to the sophisticated world of Vogue in London, New York and Paris. As Features Editor for Vogue she interviewed many major personalities of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, John Osborne, Andy Warhol, and worked with photographers David Bailey, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Lord Snowdon.

Polly Devlin was born in a remote almost medieval area in Co Tyrone in Ireland in the 1940's; there were no telephones or electricity in the region when she was growing up and ponies and traps were more common than motor cars. Her first job was as a result of having won the Vogue Talent competition, the main attraction of which was a job on the magazine.

She says the most boring question she has to answer about that time is how someone from so different and rural a background could have gone straight into life at Vogue. As Features Editor for three years she travelled the world interviewing people as disparate as Farah Diba, the Empress of Persia, to Barbra Streisand and Orson Welles. She was the first person to interview Bob Dylan in England, to write about Seamus Heaney, and almost certainly the first woman to travel across Abu Dhabi, which she did before that country became oil-rich.

She became a columnist for the New Statesman when she was twenty-three, and had her own page in the Evening Standard a year later. Soon after she went to live in Manhattan as a Features Editor and writer for Diana Vreeland on American Vogue. At this time she worked with, among others, Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Irving Penn, Norman Parkinson and Tony Snowdon.

In 1970 she stopped journalism; in 1990 she became a roving critic, with particular emphasis on art and major exhibitions for The International Herald Tribune for a year. In the same years she wrote a publication for the National Gallery of Ireland on their ceramic collections.

She has been a Judge of the Booker Prize in England and in Ireland a judge on the Irish Times Aer Lingus Literary award.

In 1983 Polly Devlin published two books of All of Us Thereand The Far Side of the Lough. They were published in thesame day, without reference to each other, by different publishers, Weidenfeld & Nicholson and Victor Gollancz. They have remained in print since then and have gone into several editions. A further edition of The Far Side of the Lough is being published later this year.

In 1991 she bought a house in Dublin and finding she knew little about the city, set about finding out more. The result was a comprehensive guide book to the city - Dublin.

She has written The Vogue book of Fashion Photography (1979) published by Thames and Hudson I Britain and Simon and Schuster in New York. There were Italian , German and French editions of this book Her interest in photography led her to write the foreword to the large retrospective of British photography A Positive View at the Saatchi gallery in London in 1994. In the 1980's she hosted a series of talks and interviews on television for BBC Northern Ireland. She has broadcast many talks and has written a radio play for the BBC in London. Stories from The Far Side of the Lough are frequently broadcast. She is on the Northern Ireland team in the Round Britain Quiz on Radio 4.

In the 1980's she attended the National Film School in England on a director's course for four years and made the documentary The Daisy Chain which she wrote and directed. In 1998 she published a collection of essays Only Sometimes Looking Sideways. Polly Devlin received an OBE for services to literature in 1993. She is currently back at University in London and is working on a novel for Chatto and Windus and a film script. Her greatest interest lies in conservation. In the last few years she and her husband have restored and conserved and planted thousands of trees where they live in Somerset. The site is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Roma Downey

Roma Downey was born and raised in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Roma came to America when touring with the Abbey Theater production of The Playboy of the Western World, for which she received a Helen Hayes Best Actress Award nomination in 1991. Her next Broadway performance was in the Rex Harrison production of The Circle.

In 1991 Roma landed the starring role in A Woman Named Jackie and turned in a remarkable performance as the late Jackie Kennedy in that Emmy Award-winning television mini-series. Roma is best known for her Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated starring role on the CBS hit drama Touched By An Angel. Roma was also nominated for the 2001 CFT Excellence Award for role as Monica in the show.

Her film credits include The Last Word, Hercules and the Amazon Women, A Child is Missing, and Borrowed Hearts. Roma also played Annie Sullivan in Monday After the Miracle. More recently Roma has starred in the made-for-television movies Sons of Mistletoe, Second Honeymoon and Test of Love.

Ms. Downey has also written a children's book called Love Is A Family published by Regan Books and has hosted the TV show Saturday Night Live.

Roma and her daughter, Reilly Marie live in Malibu, California with her husband Mark Burnett, creator of the TV series ‘Survivor’ and ‘The Apprentice’. Roma ran with the Olympic torch in Murray, Utah in February 2002 and serves on the Red Cross National Celebrity Cabinet. She also supports Northern Ireland’s Project Children and Save the Children. Roma served as the Grand Marshal for the 2000 St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Washington, D.C.

Christina Mahony

Dr. Christina Mahony was a Lecturer and Acting Director of The Center for Irish Studies. Ph.D., University College in Dublin. Her research interests include: Anglo-Irish poetry and drama, Victorian and modern literature. Her publications include Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition; articles in Irish University Review; Yeats: An Annual; The Comparatist; Etudes Theatrales; essays in Troubled Histories, Troubled Fictions: Twentieth-century Anglo-Irish Prose and Gender Perspectives in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Public and Private. Dr. Mahony is the editor of Sebastian Barry: Reclaiming Pasts in a Changing Ireland

Laura Matzer

Laura Matzer is currently the Art Collection Curator and Program Manager for the Microsoft Art Collection, directing all aspects of art collection management at Microsoft's main and subsidiary campuses (over 100 buildings in North America, Europe, and Japan) and overseeing extensive outreach and interpretative activities in conjunction with the Art Collection. She joined the Microsoft Art Collection in 2003, and was previously an art museum educator in increasing capacities at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, TX, the El Paso Museum of Art in El Paso, TX, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX, and the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum at the University of Houston, Houston, TX. Matzer holds an B.A. in Art Education from the University of Houston, an M.A. in Art Museum Education from the University of Texas at Austin. With extensive art history course work, she specializes in researching and writing about 19th and 20th century photography. Matzer is an active member of AAM (American Association of Museums), NAEA (National Art Education Association), WMA (Western Museums Association), IAPAA (International Association of Professional Art Advisors; Northwest Region Chair), IACCCA (International Association of Corporate Curators of Contemporary Art; Board Member) and ARTTABLE, an invitation-only members group of women in leadership roles in the arts.

Declan McGonagle

Declan McGonagle worked and exhibited as an artist for a period after graduation from Belfast College of Art in 1976 before being appointed the first Organiser of the Orchard Gallery in Derry in 1978. His practice as a curator and Director has included the Orchard Gallery, the ICA in London and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. He also directed independent projects such as first Tyne International and initiated innovative Public Art and Community and Educational Programme's. He has been short-listed for the Turner Prize and has also served on the Jury and has been External Examiner in a number of UK Institutions.

Declan speaks and writes regularly on the relationships between art, the artist, the institution and communities and is a contributing Editor of Art Forum. He was Irish Commissioner for the 1993 Venice and 1994 Sao Paulo Biennale, has served on many Boards and Government cultural bodies and, in 2004, completed the City Arts Centre's Civil Arts Inquiry. He now holds the chair in Art and Design at the University of Ulster.

Patrick McMullan

With a career spanning three decades, Patrick McMullan is one of the world's most celebrated party, fashion, and society photographers. Patrick McMullan was born in New York and raised in Huntington, Long Island. Educated at New York University, McMullan majored in business and "minored in Studio 54." The premiere nightlife photographer in New York City, McMullan's work appears regularly in his weekly New York Magazine column, “Party Lines". His other columns include: Allure, Interview, Hamptons, Ocean Drive and Gotham among others.

He is also a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His photography has been featured in publications worldwide such as the New York Times Magazine and Vogue, and in international editions of Harper's Bazaar, Details, Tatler and Out to name a few. Patrick McMullan's editorial works include recent stories in Details and Paper.

Patrick McMullan can also be found on TV on his "Party Flash" segment of "Full Frontal Fashion" on the WE Channel. Patrick McMullan also has a photography studio and agency in NYC. At www.patrickmcmullan.com, viewers can get a glimpse into some of the most exclusive events that take place.

Dominique Nahas

Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic.