Dean Kavanagh is a writer-director from Ireland.
Over the past 15 years, he has created 70 shorts and 6 feature films in the field of experimental cinema. His cinema intricately forges a new relationship between contemporary and legacy media formats, while combining materialist film methodologies with a focus on narrative structures. In essence, his films fuse experimental form with narrative storytelling. This work has been described as part of "an important new direction in Irish cinema" and has been screened at film festivals and cultural institutions internationally. Professor and scholar, Ciara Chambers wrote that Kavanagh "paves the way for other filmmakers to share experimental work unapologetically with 'mainstream' audiences."
In 2022, Kavanagh's first narrative feature film, Hole in the Head, received an Irish theatrical release and earned critical acclaim. He is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland's Next Generation Artists' Award (2018) and was selected as Ireland's Berlinale Talent for the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival.
He is a member of Screen Producers Ireland (SPI) and the European Film Academy (EFA), and his filmmaking is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Kavanagh also works as a film archivist.
