Creative Futures Academy at NCAD is delighted to announce Ireland’s first Professional Certificate in Creative Hospitality designed and delivered by artist Jennie Moran, that will run  for 4 weeks from 24 September – 17 October 2024.

This course introduces participants to concepts of authenticity and shared experience in their work by adopting the fundamental principles and theories of hospitality, that is the practice of welcoming strangers. 

It will explore the urgently relevant process of integrating others into a new environment. The learner will navigate the role of host to the community that forms around their work, carefully considering the exchange with guests while addressing elements such as risk taking, reciprocity, self-preservation, placemaking and care.

Course leader  Jennie Moran, uses the philosophy, culture, and infrastructure of hospitality to create opportunities for shared connection. Jennie’s recent book ‘how to soften corners’ considers the conscious act of applying an extra layer of humanity, porousness and poetry to designed spaces. These are the lessons she hopes to bring to this course.

Jennie has taught ‘Creative Hospitality’ as a module at NCAD previously and has developed this content into a standalone accredited Professional Certificate.

This course will invite guest lecturers to deliver aspects of the module. In the past Jennie has led students on visits to Áras an Uachtaráin to experience the hospitality of the Irish President and she has worked in this creative space with facilitators such as  Mavis Ramazani – Co-founder of Cooking for Freedom,  Con: temporary Quarters in the Liberties, Victory Nwabu-Ekeoma, Founder & Editor of Bia! Zine and James Edward Gomez Thompson, founder of The Great Oven – a social enterprise that builds large community ovens whose ideas and projects she will explore and examine as part of this course.

This certificate  is open to all types of learners working in a variety of fields from artists, designers, chefs, food entrepreneurs, architects, public-facing organisations, healthcare practitioners, event managers, those involved in the tourism industry, care workers, hoteliers and anyone else interested in harnessing the magic and super power of using hospitality as a mechanism for change and inclusion.

Louise Allen, Director of Creative Future Academy said: ‘Our Professional Certificate in Creative Hospitality is one of many new and exciting short courses coming on stream in the Autumn from CFA. We offer a mix of short, accredited courses, perfectly designed to fit into the busy schedules of creative professionals. Hospitality within our communities has never been more important. This course embodies in its essence what CFA offers our learners – timely, future-focused and industry led content coupled with the opportunity to gain new insights, master new techniques, and connect with a network of like-minded individuals’’.

Jennie Moran notes ‘‘Are you interested in other humans? Are you curious about how strangers connect? Does your work require you to bring people together? Then you are a host! Hospitality is not just an industry. It is the gorgeous system we have put in place, in every single corner of the earth, for welcoming strangers. It is a crazy, ill-advised, unconditional, heartfelt YES to our fellow humans. It is a deeply rooted gut instinct, bound up in honour and identity. We practise it countless times in our daily lives and we find signs of it all around us’.

She concluded “A handshake, for instance, is a diplomatic flourish invented to show that we are not carrying our weapon and mean no harm to the stranger. In this course, the philosophy, theory and customs of hospitality provide a new set of tools for empowering us as thoughtful connectors and active hosts’’.  

It will be launched in September 2024, and will run in person and online on the NCAD campus.  

Highlights of this course include

• Welcoming strangers into a space
• Developing a practical skill set for creating a hospitable environment 
• Highlighting the agency of the guest 
• Establishing and celebrating mutual trust
• Rehabilitating the word hospitality – from industry only to most profound human response to a new encounter 
• Storytelling through food and ritualising food memory 
• Self-publishing 

Dates: 24 September – 17 October 2024.

Fee: €600

More details of this course & available scholarships can be found online at 

https://creativefuturesacademy.ie/courses/professional-certificate-in-creative-hospitality/

Photo credits: Pablo Marin Garcia (above) and Alan Gilsenan (below)

ENDS

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For media inquiries, interviews, or additional information including imagery, please contact:

Pace Borza-Butterly, CFA Communications, borzabutterlyp@ncad.ie, 086 1036616