Learning Lab Agency is an interdisciplinary socially engaged arts practice platform, exploring creative and collaborative interventions into local and global cultural politics. Founded by Áine O’Brien, it enables democratic spaces for horizontal, mutual (un)learning and the production of cooperative knowledge through place-based projects.
The Learning Lab was initiated in Dublin in 2009 as an integral part of FOMACS (Forum on Migration and Communication). In 2013, it relocated to London, to form part of Counterpoints—a London-based organisation generating projects in the field of arts, migration, and social change—until 2022.
Since returning to Ireland in 2022, the Learning Lab Agency provides critical support to socially engaged artists, cultural workers and cross-sector initiatives. Learning labs are offered through a variety of formats including mentoring, curation, research, immersive incubators, and workshops.
As part of the Summer School on Collaborative Practice and Social Change, developed in partnership with Create, Ireland, the Learning Lab methodology shapes a dynamic educational and collaborative environment. Here, participants are encouraged to experiment, learn cooperatively, and envision new projects for social change.
This website showcases labs conducted with Counterpoints between 2013 and 2022, along with more recent and ongoing initiatives led by the Learning Lab Agency.
Áine O’Brien (PhD) runs the Learning Lab Agency and is a curator/researcher with extensive experience in the US, Ireland, and the UK.
Áine mentors a range of artists at the Agency and is Creative Director for the Summer School on Collaborative Practice and Social Change. She founded FOMACS (2007), a public art project in Ireland focused on migration, and co-founded Counterpoints (2012), a London agency promoting arts, displacement and social change. To date her work spans documentary film, print, and curation—centering on place, displacement, and social change. She co-edited Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (2008) and Art, Migration And The Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship (Bloombury, 2024), and co-directed films like ‘Silent Song’ (2000), ‘Here To Stay’ (2006), and ‘Promise and Unrest’ (2010). Her curatorial and learning work includes Who are We? at Tate Exchange (2017-2020), Beyond the Now Collective (2021), and Mutual Affinities (2022). Plus the ‘Collaborative Incubator Toolkit’ featuring commissions with investigative journalists and socially engaged artists (2022).
Current projects include Socially Engaged Art and the Public Practice of Reconciliation (with The MAC Belfast and National Sculpture Factory, Cork). She is Conference Co-Curator for Bearing Witness in Turbulent Times – The Urgency of Socially Engaged Art and Community Practice (The MAC, September 2026). An upcoming publication with artist Kate O’Shea will appear in Socially Engaged Art Practice in Ireland: Contested Narratives, Places and Futures (2026).
