Olwen Fouéré, photo by Rich Gilligan
(PRINCETON, NJ) -- Princeton University's Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2025-2026 series with a conversation with award-winning Irish actor, writer, and director Olwen Fouéré, who is a frequent collaborator with Ireland's Abbey Theatre. The conversation will begin on Friday, November 14, 2025 in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street.
The event is free and open to the public; tickets are required and are available to reserve in advance here. The event begins at 4:30pm.
The theater is an accessible venue, and guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at [email protected] at least one week prior to the event date.
Fouéré will discuss her career as an actor on the stage, as well as in film and television and will discuss other aspects of her artistic work in a conversation with Jane Cox, director of Princeton's Program in Theater and Music Theater and professor of the practice in theater.
Fouéré will also perform two monologues during the event that marks a continued partnership between Ireland's Abbey Theatre and the Fund for Irish Studies. Copies of Not Beckett, The Plays: Female and Non-binary Irish Playwrights Respond, which includes a new short play by Fouéré, will be available for purchase and to have signed at the event, courtesy of Labyrinth Books.
Fouéré is an actor, writer and director in theater, film, music and visual arts. Her most recent stage appearances include The Boy by Marina Carr at the Abbey Theatre and the highly acclaimed production of The President by Thomas Bernhard at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, co-produced by Sydney Theatre Company. She also recently appeared in iGirl at the Abbey Theatre; Nous l'Europe, Banquet des Peuples at the Avignon Festival; Blood Wedding with Young Vic Theatre; and Ballyturk, which was presented at the Abbey and St Ann's Warehouse. Fouéré's other notable work includes riverrun, her adaptation of the voice of the river in Finnegans Wake, which premiered at the Galway International Arts Festival 2013 and toured internationally; Lessness at Barbican International Beckett Festival; and a legendary production of Oscar Wilde's Salomé directed by Steven Berkoff at Dublin's Gate Theatre from 1988 to 1993.
In 1980 Fouéré formed Operating Theatre, an avant-garde theater company and band with composer Roger Doyle. They recently staged a reunion concert at the National Concert Hall as part of Musictown 2025 produced by Foggy Notions.
Fouéré's film and television credits include The Watchers; All You Need is Death; The Actor; The Northman; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022); Violet Gibson The Woman Who Shot Mussolini; Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald; Sea Fever; Mandy; This Must Be The Place; The Survivalist; Holding; the second season of The Tourist; The Crown season five; and the third season of Derry Girls.
Her numerous awards include an Irish Times Special Tribute Award, the Edinburgh Festival Archangel, and an Honorary Doctorate from Dublin City University for her outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland.
Founded as a national theater for Ireland in 1904 by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, the Abbey Theatre celebrates both the rich canon of Irish dramatic writing and the potential of future generations of Irish theater artists. Last fall, the Abbey's artistic director and co-director Caitríona McLaughlin and head of producing Jen Coppinger led the inaugural conversation marking the start of a new partnership between the Abbey and the Fund for Irish Studies. The partnership continued last spring with a visit by Ruth McGowan, the Abbey's literary and new work director, and Derbhle Crotty, well-known Irish actor and associate artist at the Abbey.
The 2025-26 Fund for Irish Studies Series is co-chaired by Cox and Robert Spoo, Princeton's Leonard L. Milberg '53 Professor in Irish Letters.
The Fund for Irish Studies affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, and economics not only of Ireland but of "Ireland in the world." The lecture series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
The Fund for Irish Studies website lists more information about the lecture series. Additional events scheduled for the year include:
* February 8, 2026 (Sunday) — Musician Matt Molloy, member of the traditional Irish folk band The Chieftains
* March 20 — Author, critic and scholar Fintan O'Toole delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture
* April 10 — Biographer and editor Merlin Holland on "Oscar Wilde between the li(n)es"
* April 23 (4:10pm) – Writer John Banville presents the opening keynote as part of the (De)Stabilizing Nabakov conference presented by Princeton's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and cosponsored by the Fund for Irish Studies
The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan Jr. '45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
