Eva Kenny is a writer from Dublin. In 2018, she received a PhD from Princeton for a dissertation on Samuel Beckett and American art of the 1960s and 1970s. In Spoleto, she will be developing this thesis into a book which traces Beckett’s influence as a kind of anglophone avatar of European avant-garde thought in the resuscitation and resurgence of surrealism in American art towards the century’s end.

Her short fiction and art criticism has been published in the Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, the TLS, the Dublin Review of Books, the LA Review of Books, Artforum, ArtPapers and Frieze, as well as numerous artists’ books and exhibition catalogues. She is currently finishing her first book of fiction, a collection of stories titled Colonialism with Nowhere to Go.

Kenny’s work has been supported by an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary Award and an Agility Award, two Mellon Fellowships, the Princeton Institute for International Studies, the Authors League Fund, and residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and the Museum of Literature in Ireland, where she was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence in 2023. She is a Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and a member of the International Network for Comparative Humanities.