Bio
From Düsseldorf, Germany. MFA Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Additional study University of Cologne (Linguistics, Philosophy), University of Düsseldorf (German Literature, Pedagogy) and University of Chicago (Committee on the Visual Arts). Artistic and scholarly interests bring together Cultural Policy Studies, Research Methodologies, Facilitating as Creative Practice and Performance Studies.
Personal Statement
Journeying through installation work to diagrammatic and performative procedures, my practice evolved through formal explorations of figure and ground while reading philosophy and linguistics. Extending to reflection of my own contingencies as a visual artist, this opened out to include the workings of arts organizations, with a growing curiosity of how artists and arts administrators work across their often invisible and unequally acknowledged competencies. It is a well-known observation that practitioners know more than they can, or feel the need to say. In part informed by conventions of studio conversation, for example forms of appreciative inquiry, iteration exercises, generative use of constraints, and perspective shifts, I interact with others (artists, students, workshop participants, general audiences) to provoke embedded values and embodied knowledge—action modalities—into showing themselves. This type of work can amplify personal and collective agency by rooting it in the force fields through which cultural ecologies operate. By extension, it enables those who do develop these roots to better design new structures, be they new habits, procedures, policies or organizations in support of more clearly perceived needs and abilities.
This work is political, in that it is not only deeply respectful of what others bring to the table, but also assumes that to amplify embodied ways of knowing allows them to rise up and dance.
My work translates into teaching in many ways. My courses deploy art research and performance studies in relation to cultural work in many roles (artist, designer, educator, theorist, curator, administrator), and seek to empower students by attending to embodied knowledge and alternative literacies. I approach research through qualitative research methodologies, with special interests in Artistic Research and Grounded Theory.
With so much of my work being interpersonal, I always welcome participation in projects underway at my studio and elsewhere.
Recent Thesis Advisees
Baiqi Chen (2019), "Active Contemplation: 30 Years of Huang Zhuan and Chinese Contemporary Art"
Constanza Mendoza-Guerra (2020) ""Aqui todos nos pagamos y nos damos el vuelto". Building resilience in the Venezuelan arts sector"
Grace Sheehan (2020), "Artistic Practice and Mission-Driven Organizing: A Study of Artist-Administered Projects within the Criminal Justice System"
Emily Carranza (2020), Art and Tech in New York City: Through the Network of Eyebeam
Duncan Bass (2020), "Old Masters of New Media: Competing Histories of Media Art"
Caroline Kawen Ng (2021), Hotpot Aesthetics And Commodities Of Merit: An Auto-Ethnography on Unlearning, Academic Porn, And Cosmopolitan Values
Rebecca Haley (2021), “New Imaginations for the Role of the Museum Trustee”
Tessa Mille (2022), "Doing it Together: Building Relationships Between Arts Organizations and Communities"
Alyssa Larkin (022), "Innovation in Nonprofit Arts Organizations"
Disclaimer: All work represents the views of the INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS & AUTHORS who created them, and are not those of the school or museum of the Art Institute.
