The Joan Duff/Irish Museums Trust Medal 2020
The Joan Duff/Irish Museums Trust Medal was struck in memory of the distinguished founder of the Irish Museums Trust, Joan Duff, who died in 2018. The Diploma in Arts Administration at UCD was inaugurated in 1986 with the support of the Irish Museums Trust. It is therefore very fitting that the IMT has produced this medal for awarding to the outstanding student of the year in the MA in Cultural Policy and Arts Management (the successor to the Diploma) some thirty years after UCD began to provide training in arts management.
This year’s winner is New Yorker Thea Cook. Her outstanding thesis ‘That Underdog Energy: Competition Among “Indie” Opera Companies in the New York Opera Alliance” explored the under researched phenomenon of competition in the opera sector in New York whilst also drawing on her years of experience of running her own opera company in that city.