Rate My Professor Deirdre Feeney

Deirdre Feeney is an artist and Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design, College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities, at Adelaide University. Her practice-based research focuses on the materiality of image-making, media archaeology, and optical image systems and instruments as mediators of perception and experience. She works across art, science, and technology through sustained collaborations in physics, electronic engineering, and advanced fabrication, including with the South Australian node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF-SA). Feeney's creative practice develops hybrid image systems that blend historical optical knowledge—from Renaissance natural magic and nineteenth-century optical mechanics—with contemporary digital fabrication and traditional making techniques. With a background in glass-making and the projected moving image, she employs materials such as glass, mirrors, and lenses to produce image systems that engage viewers physically and emotionally. She has held competitive research residencies and fellowships, including an ANAT Synapse Residency with the Australian National University Research School of Physics and a Research Fellowship at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, investigating nineteenth-century astronomical devices and their influence on early cinema technologies.

Feeney's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Deakin University Gallery, Bornholm Museum (Denmark), Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art (Taiwan), and William Traver Gallery (USA), and is held in public collections such as the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the National Museum of Ireland. Key publications include the journal article 'Achronologies, materiality and mechanics of time in optical moving image systems' (Animation, 2023), the book chapter ''Intersites of knowledge': Jules Janssen's nineteenth-century astronomical apparatus and a contemporary moving image system' (Data Curation and Information Systems Design from Australasia, 2024), and 'The magic lantern as a creative tool for understanding the materiality and mathematics of image-making' (The Magic Lantern at Work, 2020). She has received the Joyner Scholarship (2024-2027) and Create SA grants for projects such as 'Art Science and Technology: A Partnership for Uncertain Times' (2022-2023) and 'Light Source (Plateau's Dream)' (2024-2025). Her research welcomes cross-disciplinary collaborators and graduate researchers in practice-led research, optical media, material-led inquiry, media archaeology, and art-science collaboration.