AIC Scheme Bursary Award 2025 Recipients: Tobi Bello and Niall O Baoill

Create is pleased to announce Tobi Bello and Niall O Baoill as the recipients of the 2025 Artist in the Community Scheme Bursaries.

Tobi Bello is a Nigerian-Irish socially engaged artist, visual artist, and community worker. Her interdisciplinary practice spans photography, creative direction, archiving, and public engagement. She is founder and director of Our Village Archive, an artist and community platform and podcast documenting culturally diverse artists in Ireland.

Tobi will use the bursary to undertake a year-long period of research and reflection to deepen her collaborative visual arts practice. With mentorship from photographer Rich Gilligan and collaboration with the Irish Refugee Council, she will explore ethical image-making, authorship, and self-archiving methods, developing a care-based, sustainable framework that centres cultural visibility and co-authorship within socially engaged arts practice.

Niall O Baoill has operated intuitively as a community artist, director of arts organisations and leader in many related local, national and international cultural contexts. His practice employs an interdisciplinary and site-specific approach to the challenge of broadening the base of collaborative arts initiatives.

Niall intends to spend his bursary reviewing and repositioning his long term, durational practice, revisiting the significance of ‘communities of place’ and their relative strengths and traditions; the cultural rights of children; curating his community arts archive spanning 1985 – 2025, and communicating critical ideas related to future inter-community and inter-generational learning.

The purpose of the bursary award, part of the Arts Council’s Artist in the Community Scheme, which is managed by Create, is to support and nurture professional arts practice, for an artist in any art-form who has a track record of working collaboratively with communities of place or interest in the making and interpreting of art. This is a developmental bursary aimed at practitioners who are facing particular barriers and/or challenges in developing their collaborative socially engaged arts practice.

The bursary of €20,000 will provide the artists with time and resources to engage with and reflect on their practice. More particularly, it allows them to consider key questions associated with their collaborative arts practice and collaborative methodologies. In addition, this bursary award offers bi monthly mentoring support from Create and up to two mentoring sessions with one of the experienced collaborative socially engaged practitioners from the Artist Mentor Panel.

The award emphasises the value and benefit to an artist’s development of an extended process of engagement with their practice, and seeks to provide artists with the time and resources to think, research, reflect and engage deeply with their practice. We look forward to supporting Tobi and Niall as they begin their bursaries in early 2026.

Panel

The panel which determined this award was chaired by Tatiana dos Santos, AIC Scheme Support Officer, and consisted of Deirdre O’Mahony, Visual Artist, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, Curator and Writer, and Tomasz Madajczak, Visual Artist. Jane O’Rourke, Office Manager, Create, observed and took minutes, and Karen Whelan, Participatory Arts Support Manager, was an observer.