Kira O’Reilly is a UK based artist. Her practice is both wilfully interdisciplinary and entirely undisciplined, and stems from a visual art background. In her work she employs performance, biotechnical practices and writing to consider speculative reconfigurations around the body. Since graduating from the University of Wales Institute Cardiff in 1998, her work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK, Europe, Australia, China and Mexico. She has presented at conferences and symposia on live art and science, as well as art and technology interfaces. She has been a visiting lecturer in the UK, Australia and U.S.A in departments of visual art, drama and dance. Recent works have seen her practice develop across interdisciplinary contexts ranging from art, science and technology to performance, live art and movement work.

In October 2004 she completed an honorary research fellowship and residency at SymbioticA, the art science collaborative research lab in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, at the University of Western Australia. The fellowship was funded by a Wellcome Trust sciart research and development award. Her research concerned the exploration of the convergence between contemporary biotechnical tissue culturing and traditional lace making crafts, using skin at its cellular level as material and metaphor. She continued and expanded these investigations as an Honorary Research associate and artist in residence in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham in collaboration with Dr. Janet Smith, also funded through the Wellcome Trust award. The project included explorations of spider silk and bone, muscle and nerve cell cultures as biomedia, and the relations between tissue, text and textile as variants on the theme of techné.

In 2007, O'Reilly began to make ‘dances’, with her 43 year old non-dance trained body, resulting in a new movement based work Untitled (Syncope) commissioned for SPILL Festival of performance in Ipswich, UK. During 2008 she investigated similar performance strategies during a research period at Chisenhale Dance Space, London, developing Unitled (for you beloved) for Endurance, VIVIVD, in Birmingham.

In 2009 new works included falling sleep with a pig (2009) commissioned by The Arts Catalyst for INTERSPECIES in Manchester and London. She presented Stair Falling (2009) exhibited as part of Marina Abramovic Presents . . . at Manchester International Festival. She was also SPILL 09 Festival of Performance's Thinker in Residence, hosting a series of dynamic interdisciplainary salons which allowed audiences, along with artists and a variety of experts, to explore the festival's themes. Her series inthewrongplaceness (2005 – 2009) was curated by Jens Hauser in the highly successful exhibition Sk-interfaces, Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society, at Casino Luxembourg. In December 2010– February 2011 she collaborated with Canadian artist, Jennifer Willet, on a photographic series, Refolding (Laboratory Architectures) for the What Next for the Body exhibition at Arnolfini, Bristol. Publications that have recently featured her work are: Sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society, edited by Jens Hauser, Liverpool University Press, 2008; Human Futures, edited by Andy Miah, FACT & Liverpool University Press 2009; Art + Science Now, ed. Stephen Wilson, Thames and Hudson, 2010; Marina Abramovic and the Future of Performance Art by Paula Orrelle, Prestel 2010; and The Many Headed Monster by Joshua Sofaer, London, Live Art Development Agency, 2010. Though she primarily performs as a solo artist, in 2011 O'Reilly took part in the devising process and performed in the Robert Wilson directed ensemble work Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, 2011 – present, in numerous locations in the EU, UK and North America.In 2013 she completed an AHRC funded creative fellows at Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London developing Untitled Techné which explored performance workswhich hinged between the laboratory and the gallery.