Professor Declan Keeney

Overview

Declan Keeney, PhD, MA, BMus(Hons), LTCL, PgCHET, PgDIP, SFHEA, FRSA is Co-Founder & CEO of Studio Ulster Ltd, a £72m ($91m) 75000ft2 commercial Virtual Production studio complex and creative tech company working at every level of the film and screen industries. The facilities incorporate a dedicated UKRI-AHRC funded creative technologies research lab and are located at Belfast Harbour Studios in NI.

Declan holds a Professorship (Chair) of Screen Technologies & Innovation here at Ulster University and is Director of the CoSTAR Screen Lab.

He is a board member of the British Film Institute and Northern Ireland Governor, a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts, a member of the British Council’s Arts & Creative Economy Advisory Group and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

To date Declan has secured more than £91.5m ($116m) of live grant-based research and development investments in support of the screen and creative tech sectors in NI.

Policy Fellow of the Future Observatory at the Design Museum in London. An AHRC/DCMS funded fellowship exploring net zero and carbon reduction in the Screen Industries.

Declan as Director of the CoSTAR Screen Lab in NI, oversees a £14m investment in R&D&I in Virtual Production & Real-time creative technologies in one of the largest creative technologies research networks in Europe. With colleagues at UU Declan secured £3m from the Levelling Up Fund for a flexible virtual production studio & £25.2m from the Belfast Region City Deal fund.

He has been a Co-investigator at Future Screens NI, a £13m AHRC funded Creative Cluster, and a Co-investigator on a £3.2m EPSRC Network+ grant ‘Virtual Production in the Digital Economy’ with partner Universities, York, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and the University of the Arts in London and is a Co-I on a Green Transition Ecosystem and AHRC funded £4.6m ‘Future Island’ project working with Rathlin Islanders aim to be NetZero.

Declan established the Ulster Screen Academy in 2020 which is now home to 900+ students at UU. The Academy, officially opened a £1.6m Virtual Production studio training facility in Belfast, the first of its kind in any university in the UK or Ireland and one of the very first globally.

Over 25 years of film and television production experience, including 13 years as staff at the BBC. Declan is originally from Donegal in the Northwest of Ireland and is an expert on future workforce development, studio design for large scale production, virtual production techniques and VP facilities, regularly consulting for industry all over the world.