Dr Michael Holly is an artist, filmmaker, researcher, and Lecturer in Film Practice at Queen’s University Belfast.
Michael has exhibited extensively as a visual artist, often working in video installation, including at PUBLICS, Helsinki (2024), Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre (2022), South Tipperary Arts Centre (2022), Tulca Festival of Visual Arts (2024 & 2022), Riverbank Arts Centre (2018), Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem (2017), Roscommon Arts Centre (2015), and Y Galerii, Tartu (2015).
Film festival screenings include: Hungry Hill (made in collaboration with Mieke Vanmechelen) at Galway Film Fleadh 2023, IFI Documentary Festival 2023, Offline Film Festival 2023, IndieCork Festival 2023, Chicago Irish Film Festival 2023, Kerry Film Festival 2023, Lily of the Valley at Kerry Film Festival 2023, Seanie Barron at Fastnet Film Festival 2021, Cork International Film Festival 2021, Yofi Film festival, New York 2021, Like a mouse (made in collaboration with Mieke Vanmechelen) at Chicago Underground Film Festival 2022, amongst others.
For his creative-practice PhD in Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, titled Performative Feedback Filmmaking: Participatory Documentary and Creative Self-Representation in the Community, Michael interacted with a rural GAA club in County Cork for three years as a filmmaker, volunteer and filmmaking facilitator. The result of this study was a series of exhibitions, talks and discussions. His research interest include hybrid documentaries, participatory practices and experimental nonfiction filmmaking methodology development.
Selected writings include, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor: Cosmic Realism at Eye Filmmuseum, Moving Image and Art Journal (MIRAJ) 13.2 On the particularities of experience and spectatorship in Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Commensal as experience and Caniba as story, Studies in Documentary Film. November 25th, 2023; Xenogenesis, The Otolith Group at Irish Museum of Modern Art, curated by Annie Fletcher, Moving Image and Art Journal (MIRAJ) 12.1.
Michael is a long-time collaborator with the art, publishing and curatorial organisation Askeaton Contemporary Arts, run by Michelle Horrigan and Sean Lynch. Michael has worked with ACA on several projects, including eight short films and a publication, Men Who Eat Ringforts in 2019.