Education
College
Huston School of Film and Digital Media, University of Galway
MA in Screenwriting
Result: 1st Class Honour
University of Galway
Diploma in Film Studies
Result: 1st Class Honour
University of Galway
MA in English
Result: 1st Class Honour
University of Galway
BA in English and History
Result: Second Class Honour, 1st Degree
Residencies
Clarion West Writers Workshop, Seattle, USA
Six-week Residential Writers Workshop
This annual six-week residential workshop only accepts 18 writers from an international field based on the merits of the applicants’ writing. The class is taught by a different professional author or editor every week. Each student must complete a short story to deadline every week of the workshop. The focus is to prepare the students for professional careers. Maura was the first Irish writer to attend Clarion West, and was awarded the Gordon R. Dickson Scholarship
Wom@rts Comics & Illustrators Residency, Angoulême, France
10-day Comic Book Residency
Grand Angoulême and its European partners selected ten European comics authors and illustrators to participate in a 10-day residency in Angoulême, France from 24th September to 3rd October 2018.
Over the course of the residency every artist had to produce 2 separate pieces in response to Simone de Beauvoir’s iconic text, The Second Sex. Maura’s piece was called ‘Interview with a Sphinx’, and was penciled, inked, coloured and lettered by hand using pencil, ink and colouring pencil.
The artworks will be part of an international travelling exhibition in various countries from 2018-2020.
Writing Workshops
FÁS Screen Training Ireland
Scene Analysis Course (FETAC Certified)
An intensive six-day course that explored the precise craft of writing scenes for film through examples and workshopped material, taught by Beth Serlin: a L.A.-based screenwriter, story analyst and script tutor.
Galway Film Centre
8-Week Foundation Course in Film
Directed a short film, called ‘Loop de Loop’, which was written, produced, filmed and edited with my fellow classmates.
Filmbase Ireland
An Introduction to Screenwriting
A practical 6-week workshop detailing how to write for film taught by Stephen Walsh.