I am a Manchester-based artist and writer working across moving image, sound, and performance. My practice moves between the geological and the intimate – attending to layered histories, submerged stories, and living ecologies that shape how places are experienced, remembered, and reimagined.

I came to this work through varied work and life experience. I trained in theatre and community arts, and have written poetry all of my life – both of which run through everything I make. I spent years teaching creative media and performance in Manchester, London, Edinburgh and the Americas, which gave me a deep belief in the generative possibilities of working with other people, and in the value of making space for voices that might otherwise go unheard.

After a decade moving between teaching, travel, and creative practice, I returned to formal study – completing an MA in Photography at Manchester School of Art in 2021, where I began making the research-led, collaborative films and sound works that now define my practice. I am currently a doctoral candidate in Geography and Environmental Studies at the Open University, funded through the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, exploring the River Irk in North Manchester as a living site of cultural heritage – tracing the oral histories, material flows, and community connections that bind body, city, and river together.

My work has been commissioned by the Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of Oxford, PRiSM at the Royal Northern College of Music, and Creswell Crags Museum, and I have been awarded grants from Arts Council England, The Royal Geographical Society, and The Eaton Fund.

In 2026 I take up residencies with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Oslo and as Goetemann Environmental Artist in Residence with Ocean Alliance. Alongside my research, I run Liquid History – workshops and soundwalks where rivers become living archives.

Drawn to waterways, skyscapes, and sites of displacement, I work collaboratively across disciplines with scientists, composers, historians, and communities, making work that is poetic and inquisitive, alive to the constraints places hold and the histories that might be liberated from them.

Artist Portrait below by 王淳眉Chun-Mei Wang

Contact: fionasineadbrehony@gmail.com