Vaida Varnagiene

Vaida Varnagiene is a Lithuanian-Irish printmaker working across intaglio etching, mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing), and digital print, based at Graphic Studio Dublin. Born in Klaipėda, Lithuania, she has lived and worked in Dublin since 2007, building a parallel set of qualifications in fine-art printmaking and architecture.

She earned a BA (Honours) in Fine Art from the Technological University of Dublin in 2015, the year she received the Graphic Studio Dublin Graduate Award and became a studio member; she had earlier trained in urban design and landscape architecture, a background that informs the strong sense of architectural draftsmanship in her Dublin cityscape etchings. Her practice runs in two registers: small to medium-scale intaglio city-views of Dublin streetscapes, and a separate body of more abstract, architecturally derived compositions.

Varnagiene deepened her expertise in mokuhanga during a 2019 MI-LAB Artist-in-Residence Program at Fuji-Kawaguchiko, Japan — the international residency at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory near Mt. Fuji that has trained a generation of non-Japanese mokuhanga practitioners. Her work created for Graphic Studio Dublin's 60th-anniversary Kanreki brief was shown at The Model, Sligo (2020) and at Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin (2021). A 2023 Graphic Studio Dublin Wilkinson Award and a 2023 Culture Ireland Grant supported subsequent work, and a 2020 residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris placed her within the Dublin–Paris printmaking exchange. She has also held a Graphic Studio Dublin Education Programme Officer role.

Varnagiene's work is held in the OPW State Art Collection (Office of Public Works, Ireland), the Trinity College Dublin Art Collection, and the China Printmaking Museum, with further works in collections in Russia, Ukraine, and Latvia. Her practice sits at the productive intersection of Lithuanian roots, Irish residence, and Japanese mokuhanga technique.