BFF- 2023 judging Panel
Tommy Creagh
Tommy is the Bloomsday Film Festival organiser and head programmer and got into running the festival after he made a short film based on ‘The Dead’ called ‘Land of Winter’ and saw more potential to explore the Joycean Cinematic world.
Tommy is an award winning English-Irish writer & director with a passion for expressive, lyrical, storytelling with great performances at the centre. He graduated from Bristol UWE in 2017 with a 1st Class Honours Degree in Filmmaking, and since then he has been making films, music videos, and theatre. His films have won several awards and been shown at over 50 film festivals around the world, and his music videos have received over 100K hits to date. His most notable films are Father of the Man (Winner of Best Short Film at the Vienna Independent Film Festival), & Land of Winter (Winner of Best Irish Short at the Dublin International Film Festival & Best Young Talent at the New Renaissance Film Festival)
Sinéad Gleeson
Sinéad Gleeson is an Irish Writer. Her essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. She is the editor of four anthologies including The Art of the Glimpse and the award-winning The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, and The Glass Shore: Short Stories. Sinéad has engaged in multi-disciplinary collaborations with artists and musicians, including commissions from The Wellcome Collection, BBC and Frieze. In 2021, she worked with composer Stephen Shannon and artists Aideen Barry on By Slight Ligaments (Limerick City Gallery) and Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon on The Map / We Are The Map (Rua Red). She is co-editor with Kim Gordon of This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music. Her debut novel, Hagstone, will be published in 2024 by 4 th Estate.
Baldwin Li
Baldwin is an Oscar® and BAFTA-nominated film producer. His debut feature film ENGLAND IS MINE, a biopic based on the early life of pop icon Morrissey, was released in cinemas worldwide in 2017 and subsequently on Netflix. His first major short film THE VOORMAN PROBLEM, starring Martin Freeman and Tom Hollander, was screened at over 100 festivals worldwide winning numerous awards.
His interest in James Joyce started as a teenager - ever since reading the first few pages of Ulysses, borrowed from the school library, he was hooked. He fast became a committed Joycean, which led him to an English degree at Balliol College, University of Oxford. In 2004, he was one of the very few undergraduates to to present a paper at the Bloomsday Centenary James Joyce Symposium in Dublin. The influence of Joyce on his film work is, as Stephen might describe it, ineluctable.
Caitriona Ni Threasaigh
Caitríona Ní Threasaigh is an actor and visual artist. She has a BFA from NCAD, Dublin. She trained as an actor at The Gaiety School of Acting, Dublin, along with studying The Michael Checkov Technique with Joerg Andrees (Germany) and Clown Through Mask with Sue Morrison (Canada). She has performed many roles in theatre, including Prospero in The Tempest (2013, Germany), TV, including Móna in Ros na Rún (2014, TG4, Galway) and film, including Chantelle in Deeper Thing (2018, Nigeria). She has also been in several music videos, New Friend by Ae Mak being the most recent (2020, Dublin) and has performed a 30 minute piece of Molly Bloom's solilquy at The James Joyce Tower, Sandymount since 2014. She first performed an extract of the solilquy at Áras an Uachtaráin for President Michael D. Higgins and his guests at the Bloomsday celebrations in 2013. In 2018 she made a film of the solilquy called Penelope, which was shot by the up and coming director of photography, Conor Tobin.