Maria Gillen

Name:

Gillen, Maria

Category:

Adults, Children, Festivals, Corporate, Community, Storyteller in Residence, Storymaking Workshops, Storytelling Workshops, Medicinal Storytelling Groups (based on her work as a Dramatherapist and a Fetac Level 5 & 6 Trainer)

Availability:

Based in Cork City but willing to travel.  If travelling outside Ireland would prefer if there were a number of gigs to attend

Repertoire:

Wisdom Stories, Gathered Stories, Irish Myths & Legends, Historical Tales, Original Stories, Participatory Stories, Irish Folk tales, World Myths and Legends

Preferred audience:

Maria loves all her audiences who stretch in age from the cradle to the grave - from all corners of the earth, from every ability and special ability, from Community to Corporate.  There are no borders or limits in the land of story and Maria tries to incorporate this wonderful freedom into her work.

Background experience:

Maria is the current Storyteller in Residence for the Kerry Writers Museum.  She is a well known Bean An Tí (Irish Session Host) on the Irish Storytelling Circuit.  She loves listening to stories and will tell a story at the drop of a hat.  She loves co-creating stories with anyone ‘from the cradle to the grave’.  She believes deeply in the power of stories to build communities, heal prejudice and to build resilience.  She is a member of IACAT (Irish Association of Creative Arts Therapists).  She is an award winning storyteller having won the longest running Story Competition in Ireland - Finuge - twice and the Butter Roads Storytelling Competition.

Maria spent 22 years in a Global Multinational environment, spending her last 4.5 years as a European Operations Manager.  She became a Biodynamic Therapist in 2007 and has an MA in Dramatherapy from Maynooth. She comes from a family where stories are cherished and is very interested in what the wisdoms of yesteryear have to offer us in today’s world.

She is as comfortable Storytelling and Storymaking on the Cyber Platforms as she is in live environments.  She has run workshops for Adobe, Johnson Controls, UCC, Maynooth University and Olomouc University in the Czech Republic.  She has appeared as Featured Teller at Kerry Writers Museum, as a Storyteller at the Listowel Literary Festival, and at the Cape Clear Storytelling Festival. She also loves working deep in communities finding out what magic tools they possessed and used to get them through the great conflicts and change in the 20th and 21st Centuries.  She uses this information and her background skills to design and deliver Team Training, Public Speaking Courses, Improvisation Classes etc. across all these environments.

If you have an idea involving stories and you are not sure if she’d be interested – well chances are she will probably give it a go.