Our team
Meet the international team behind the Mother Tongues Festival 2020!
Dr Francesca La Morgia
Festival Director
Francesca La Morgia is the founder and director of the Mother Tongues Festival. She is passionate about languages and community, and an Olympic champion in non-stop chatting! When remembering the previous editions of the Mother Tongues Festival she thinks of the warmth of children’s laughter, the dances of people from all over the world embracing each other, the powerful messages written on a wall. When she is not daydreaming about Mother Tongues, Francesca can be found in lecture rooms in Maynooth, Dublin and Belfast teaching linguistics to the next generation of language lovers.
francesca [at] mothertongues.ie
Elena Cristofanon
Festival Manager
Since Elena moved to Dublin from Rome in 2014, language became a fundamental issue to her, as she found herself struggling with the barrier of truly express her ideas and passions in a language she didn’t fully control.
One year later she decided to learn Spanish (for love) and also started teaching Italian to Irish people. At that point, she realized how much bilingualism and multilingualism can shape and change people’s minds. With an academic background in art history, a master in Standards for education in museums and her skills in graphic and web design she looks after the creative and administrative side of Mother Tongues.
elena [at] mothertongues.ie – www.elenacristofanon.com
Inês Páscoa Baptista
Operations Manager
Inês is a freelance translator/interpreter and project manager. She has a Master Degree in Literary Translation from the University of Florence and has worked as an HR assistant with Eures, as a travel agent and as an international customer care support agent.
Passionate about languages for as long as she can remember, she speaks Portuguese, Italian and English fluently. In her student years in Portugal and later in Italy she lived with people from different countries and cultures – this cultural exchange made her realize that multiculturalism and multilingualism are the basis for a stronger society. She lives in Ireland since late 2017 with her family, raising her daughter to be trilingual.
ines [at] mothertonguesfestival.com
Ema Stapleton
Event coordinator
Ema is a writer and musician from Dublin. She has a Masters in Popular Music Research from Goldsmiths College, London and an undergraduate degree in Commercial Modern Music from BIMM Dublin. She enjoys teaching music theory and vocals to all levels. She learnt French and Irish in school and loves speaking them whenever she gets the chance. She has volunteered for numerous music festivals and is putting her festival knowledge to the test by helping to organise Mother Tongues Festival! (Photo by Ruthless Imagery)
ema [at] mothertonguesfestival.com
Aoife Breen
Marketing Officer
Aoife is a Digital Marketing Student from Dublin. She has a passion for languages and speaks both English and French, which she picked up whilst living in France during her undergraduate studies. Her time in France, in particular, gave her a real appreciation for the importance of multilingualism and knowledge of cultural diversity in society. She was lucky enough to be an au-pair to three young French children whilst living in Lyon. It brought her joy to be able to teach them English and to watch them begin to express themselves so confidently in a new language. It was what she learned from them, however, that showed her just how important language is for true self-expression. Aoife will bring her passion for languages and her experience from her studies to her role as Digital Marketing Officer for the MT Festival 2020.
aoife [at] mothertonguesfestival.com
Elizaveta Zykova
Marketing Officer
Liza came to Ireland in 2014 right after graduating from school in Russia. She left her small hometown with a goal to live abroad and to complete the Bachelor of Commerce degree at University College Dublin. During this time, she realised that marketing was her passion. This motivated her to go further and today she is a recent MSc Marketing graduate from UCD’s Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. During her 5 years in Ireland, she has been surrounded by people from different places all around the world. As a person who is always looking for an opportunity to step out of her comfort zone and to explore her personal abilities a bit further, she became a student representative at the UCD International student society where her duties included communication with international students as well as the organisation of events. Being an international and multilingual person herself, she considers working with Mother Tongues to be a new and exciting chapter which will allow her to put her marketing and communication skills into practice.
liza [at] mothertonguesfestival.com
Kate Higham
Marketing Officer and copywriter
Kate is a Freelance Content Marketing Writer based in Dublin. She has a Higher Diploma in Marketing, Advertising, PR & Sales, a Diploma in Digital Marketing and is a qualified Copywriter. As a writer, Kate is obsessed with the art of words and storytelling. Throughout her student years, Kate fell in love with learning stories across other languages and has set herself a goal to tackle German over the next couple of years.
Kate volunteered for Mother Tongues to marry her love of the arts and her passion for writing with her experience with running events and marketing. As our Marketing Officer, she hopes to bring the story of Mother Tongues alive, online and offline. When Kate is not helping out with Mother Tongues, she is kept busy running her own content marketing business: CopyKate.
kate [at] mothertongues.ie – www.copykate.ie