Dara Waldron is a documentary scholar and author whose research explores the borders and intersections between fiction and nonfiction film and media.

He is the author of two monographs,the most recent New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory published in 2018. He is a regular contributor to Found Footage Magazine and Millennium Film Journal and he has published widely across the arts and humanities.

Dara is also the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir A Sheepdog Named Oscar: Love and Companionship in Rural Ireland published in September 2025 in the US with Dopplehouse Press and due to be published in the UK and Ireland in 2026 with Simon & Schuster UK. The book explores the relationship between human and nonhuman animals against the backdrop of rural Ireland, drawing on Dara's documentary photography to illustrate the real-life story of dog rescue and rehabilitation narrated in the memoir.

Dara teaches Critical & Contextual Studies at the Limerick School of Art & Design, Technological University of the Shannon (Midwest) and lives on the Limerick/Tipperary border.