Dara Waldron is an academic researcher and educator whose main area of specialisation is film and expanded documentary. He is also the  author of the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling memoir A Sheepdog Named Oscar: Love and Companionship in Rural Ireland, published in 2025 by Dopplehouse Press.

Dara's background is in Film Studies, where, as an academic, he has been at the forefront of film scholarship in documentary and nonfiction for over a decade. His 2018 monograph, New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory (Bloomsbury Academic) offers a new way of addressing documentary film, while tackling the distinction between art and documentary in new ways. Dara outlines a filmmaking methodology based on an ethics of mutual trust and friendship between the film director and subject that is teased out furthermore in his memoir.

In 2020, at the height of the COVID 19 pandemic, frustrated by lockdown, Dara wrote a draft of A Sheepdog Named Oscar. Themes of trust and friendship, collaboration and interaction (between human and nonhuman) are at the forefront, extending the issues that concern his research as an academic scholar. The book tells the story of Dara's fantastical discovery of an abandoned border collie/sheepdog who he befriends and later adopts from a derelict farm in the East Clare region of rural Ireland. The book is essaystic and subjective, celebrating the unique allure of the Irish landscape and the threatened traditions that define it. By exploring the often tense relationship between humans and animals around the principle of care, the book meditates on the fundamental questions of our age: what does it mean to care for others? Why should we care for the environment? How can we foster an authentic relationship with the natural world in a technological age of social media and the internet? 

A Sheepdog Named Oscar was awarded Barnes & Noble nonfiction book of the month for September 2025 and later peaked at number four in The New York Times bestseller list in the month of September.

Over the course of his career, Dara has travelled the world lecturing on film and documentary, has given key note addresses and has been a doctoral examiner from London to Melbourne. He is a regular convenor of public seminars and events. He contributes regularly to Irish media and in particular the politics and culture online journal Cassandra Voices.