Alison conneely, textile artist and costume designer, award winning designer.
 
 
Alongside her studio and gallery work, Conneely designs costume for film, dance, and performance- most recently for Jesse Jones's The White Cave, Singapore Biennale, 2025 and Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon, National Gallery, London, NG200, 2024. She works from early concept through fabrication, treating costume as an extension of the same material research that runs through her practice.                                                                                                             Alison Conneely is an Irish textile artist & costume designer whose practice is rooted in over two decades of interdisciplinary exploration. She began her career with an eponymous fashion label, stocked at Bloomingdale's in New York and carried in Dublin's Havana alongside Rick Owens and Comme des Garçons. That grounding in independent design underpins a practice that has since moved between myth, material, and entanglement — textile as archive, ritual, and living system. Her work frequently unfolds through collaborative processes with leading contemporary artists, scholars, and international institutions, including the United Nations, bringing together artistic, social, and academic methodologies with a sustained commitment to cross-sector engagement and public discourse. 
Since 2024, she has collaborated with artist Jesse Jones on an ongoing body of work spanning film, installation, and performance. Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon, Jesse Jones (2024) was commissioned for the National Gallery, London's Bicentenary programme (NG200); The White Cave (2025) followed as a major film and installation for the Singapore Biennale; and AtLantis AtLand (2026), developed with Jesse Jones, Stephanie Lamprea, and Alistair MacDonald, premiered as a site-specific performance at Open Ear Festival on Sherkin Island, with a vinyl recording due for release in 2027.
In 2022, Conneely presented HAIL THEE: We Come in Reveries of Change, a landmark project commissioned by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Conceived as a platform for global dialogue on social justice and reproductive rights, the initiative convened an international cohort of artists—Alice Maher, Isabel Nolan, Jesse Jones, Rachel Fallon, Jahanavi Inniss, Paula McGloin, Rosa Farahini, Alannah Davey, Hina Khan and anthropologist Sara O'Rourke—whose practices collectively interrogate embodiment, autonomy, and the politics of care.
The project received critical acclaim and was selected as a keynote event for Design Week 2023. Its accompanying symposium assembled a distinguished panel of cultural leaders and thinkers, including Annie Fletcher (director, IMMA), Emma Dabiri (author and broadcaster), Roza Farahini (Iranian author and activist), Alice Maher (artist), and Susan McGonagle (UNHCR barrister and protection director).
Earlier, in 2016, Conneely was commissioned by the National Museum of Ireland to contribute to the State's official 1916 Centenary commemorations. Her project, The Shuttle Hive: A Century of Rising Thread, encompassed an exhibition, workshops, a public programme of events, and the major conference Mise Éire? Shaping a Nation through Design. Engaging critically with modernist visual culture, the work examined the entanglements of revolt, myth-making, and national identity—particularly as they relate to women's cultural and political agency during the struggle for independence.
Developed through a collaborative framework, the project drew on the expertise of anthropologists, historians, composers, silversmiths, weavers, and curators from across the museum's collections. Through these interdisciplinary dialogues, Conneely articulated a nuanced study of how material culture bears witness to social transformation.
Conneely's current studio practice extends this research into living systems, growing textiles from bacterial cellulose (SCOBY) in dialogue with Donna Haraway's writing on multispecies collaboration. This work is supported by the Dublin City Arts Office Incubation Space Award 2026, held at The Lab, Dublin, where she is developing a solo body of work toward exhibition.
Across her practice, Conneely continues to investigate how art can function as a site of collective memory, civic responsibility, and imaginative resistance. Her work foregrounds the belief that creative practice is both a critical pursuit and an instrument for cultural change. She works across costume, textile, and installation for gallery, film, dance, and performance contexts. 
Conneely is a board member of the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland, and works as an external examiner in fashion and textiles at ATU.
 
Fashion Archive
From Alison Conneely's eponymous label, stocked internationally 2010–2020.
Woman stands on rocks wearing a Donegal Tweed bomber jacket and skirt. She has her hands in her pocket and there is a hawthorn tree behind her.
A black-and-white photo of a person standing in profile, looking to the right, with long hair and wearing a velvet and Donegal tweed top and skirt.
A side profile of a woman with dark skin and long black hair tied in a ponytail, wearing a black wool cape, standing against an aged, textured wall with cracks and peeling areas. Flower installation from flowers and foliage had-picked in Connemara.
A woman wearing a transparent latex sleeveless top and a white skirt made from leather, standing against a light green wall.
Two women in elegant dresses standing against a textured beige background with greenery. The woman on the left wears a kiskin outfit, holding a vine with leaves. The woman on the right wears a pleated, high-neck, off-white dress with ruffled sleeves.
A woman with dark, voluminous hair styled in an upswept manner, wearing a light beige satin dress with long sleeves and a gathered neckline, standing against a plain white wall.
A woman with long, dark, voluminous hair wearing a tight red dress, standing against a plain, off-white textured wall, looking slightly downward.