Amanda Coogan

Who is Amanda Coogan?

Amanda Coogan is an Irish performance artist, living and working in Dublin and Berlin. She studied Painting at Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland, Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece, and Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and under the performance artist Marina Abramović at the HBK Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Braunschweig, Germany.

In her performance art, she produces video and photographs from live performances.

She explains how she came to choose performance art over painting:

Her work often begins with her own body and often challenges the expectations born of context. Not deaf herself, she is a first language signer and in one striking work she dances to Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," while signing the lyrics. In a more recent work, produced for the Liverpool Biennial, she filmed local people headbanging to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

Coogan has exhibited in Marking the Territories at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, was an award winner at EV+A 2002 in Limerick, was selected by the Royal Hibernian Academy for the Eurojets Futures exhibition in 2003, and was an invited participant in the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. The Limerick City Gallery of Art hosted an exhibition of her installation work in 2005.