(l-r) Cian O'Brien; Neil-Jack (Alphonsus) Hamilton; Alice Rekab.
Enter the AIB Young Portrait Prize 2025
Looking for the AIB Portrait Prize competition? Enter it here.
Deadline: Friday 4 July 2025, 10pm (IST)
Running alongside the annual AIB Portrait Prize, the AIB Young Portrait Prize is an inclusive art competition with the aim of fostering and supporting creativity, originality, and self-expression in children and young people. Open to entrants aged 18 and under, of all abilities, from across the island of Ireland, the Prize celebrates emerging young talent in portraiture.
Our panel of judges will select 20 finalists across four age categories: 6 and under, 7–11, 12–15 and 16–18. These artworks will be featured in an exhibition in the Portrait Gallery from 8 November 2025 - 15 March 2026.
Entries for the 2025 competition will open in April. Full details on application dates and the submission process will be available at that time.
Applications for the AIB Young Portrait Prize 2025 have now moved online:
Entries will no longer be accepted via email. All applicants must submit their entries using the links to the online entry form on this page, available below in both English and Irish. Please ensure that you have read the rules and FAQs before submitting your entry form. You'll find them at the foot of this page.
If you have any questions or need support during the application process, please contact: [email protected].
Deadline:
Please submit your entry using the link to the online entry form on this page before 10pm (IST) 4 July 2025. Best of luck to everyone entering the competition this year!
Judges
Cian O’Brien: Cian O’Brien is the founder of COBA: Cian O’Brien Arts, a newly established production house and touring agency dedicated to supporting large-scale cultural projects. COBA also collaborates strategically with cultural organisations on policy, recruitment, strategy, and communications. Current projects include work with First Music Contact, Safe to Create, Rough Magic Theatre Company, thisispopbaby, Ireland’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026 and artists such as Fearghus Ó Conchúir, Meltybrains?, Eoghan Carrick & Lauren Jones and Jessie Thompson. Previously Artistic Director of Project Arts Centre (2011–2024), he is Chair of Dead Centre Theatre, and formerly served as Deputy Chair of the National Campaign for the Arts (2016–2022) and Chair of Baboró International Arts Festival for Children (2021-2025). In 2023, he was appointed to the Comité Strategique of the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, by Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Neil-Jack Alphonsus Hamilton: Neil-Jack Alphonsus Hamilton is an artist based in Donegal. His oil portraits are known for their psychological depth, exploring themes of identity, vulnerability, and the human condition through a narrative lens. Influenced by classical painting, cinema and psychological realism, his work blends traditional technique with contemporary storytelling. A graduate of Ulster University, he has exhibited with the Royal Hibernian Academy, Royal Ulster Academy, Royal Scottish Academy and more. He was a featured contestant on Portrait Artist of the Year in 2022 and 2024 and exhibited in the National Gallery of Ireland for the AIB Portrait Prize 2024.
Alice Rekab: Alice Rekab is an Irish artist, researcher and educator currently based in Dublin. Their practice is concerned with expressions and iterations of complex cultural and personal narratives. Rekab takes their own mixed-race Irish identity as a starting point from which to explore experiences of race, place and belonging. They investigate the idea of the body, the family and the nation as reflections of one another, and develop these ideas through material analysis and renditions of family, its bodies, and the spaces they move through and inhabit. Over the last 10 years Rekab’s practice has centred around processes of collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange, from which they produce film, performance, image, print, text and sculpture, creating new intersectional narratives and objects for exhibition. Rekab’s recent projects include Bedrock: Liverpool Biennial 2025, Let Me Show You Who I Am Edinburgh Art Festival 2025, Clann Miotlantach/Mythlantics, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh (2024), touring across Ireland in 2025–26; Mehrfamilienhaus: A Home To More Than One Family, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2023); FAMILY LINES Project, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2022); Mountain Language, Galway Arts Centre (2022); Concealed in the half-light, Catalyst Arts Centre, Belfast (2021); and Migration Sings, commissioned by Temple Bar Gallery+Studios for Culture Night (2020). Their work is in the collections of Trinity College Dublin, The Cathal Ryan Trust, The Irish Museum of Modern Art and The Arts Council of Ireland.
(l-r) Cian O'Brien; Neil-Jack (Alphonsus) Hamilton; Alice Rekab.
