Research Project (post-doc) 

'Performance Cultures of Critique: AI, Embodiment, and Posthumanist Aesthetics'

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Wissenschaftsstipendium, Stadt Wien, September 2023-April 2024

„'Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn': Feminismus, Ausstellungspolitik, und Ästhetische Wahrnehmung"

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Research Residency Fellowship, steirischer Herbst, 2022    

With the project: "Sometimes I think I was a parrot, but then I realised I am only a fish":

 On "Animal Art" & its Contemporary Condition

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Post-doc Research Grant, OEAD, 2021-22

I am researching ‘feminist animalities’ in a comparative reading of UK and Austrian feminist performances. The project is located at the Academy of Fine Arts, and supervised by Prof. Sabeth Buchmann.

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EDUCATION

PhD, 2017-21                                                                                                

‘Dressaged Animality’: Human and Animal Actors in Contemporary Performance 

Royal Holloway, University London, Drama, Theatre, and Dance Department

Supervisor Prof. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck & advisor Dr. Georgina Guy

Examiners: Prof. Petra Lange-Berndt & Prof. Alexandra Kolb

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Humans have had to increasingly perform like dressaged animals since the second-half of the twentieth-century. The question how we train, rehearse, and perform together, without discriminating against other human and non-human animals in competitive capitalism remains urgent. Framed with Henri Lefebvre’s late theory of dressage, the dissertation analyses the relation between ‘societal dressage’ and the 'embodied animality' that humans and animals share. It develops an art historical-performance-animal studies methodology by theorising and historicising a selection of unexplored contemporary artistic performance works (experimental theatre, dance, visual art performances, and video work) by renown and widely unknown American, British, and European artists in which humans perform with, or without real animals from the late 1960s until the late 2010s. Conceiving of 'animality’ as being incorporated in, as well as generating artists’ ‘self-dressaged’ performances that critique the very same infrastructurally installed economic and political ‘dressage mechanism’ within which their work operates, the thesis offers the dialectical concept of 'dressaged animality’ as a mode of social critique. It proposes that artistic performances that include by humans danced, real, or mediated animals reflect the tensions operating between societal dressage, self-dressage, and embodied human and animal animality, and argues for the social relevance of artistic work and critique that stem from human actors’ embodied animality. 

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MA

Aisthesis: Historische Diskurse in Kunst & Literatur

Bayrisches Elitenetzwerk: Augsburg, Regensburg, Eichstätt, LMU, GER

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MA

Art History

University College London, UK

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BA

Economic Theory with Journalism

Kingston University, UK

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MEMBERSHIPS

AICA, International Association of Art Critics

Associate Fellowship, Higher Education Academy, UK

Österreichischer Verband für Kunsthistoriker/innnen (VöKK)

International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR)

Minding Animals, Germany

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GRANTS

MA7 Wissenschaftsstipendium, Stadt Wien, 2023-24.

Archival Research fellowship, steirischer herbst, Graz, 2022. 

Post-Doc Ernst-Mach research grant, Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, 2021-22.

University of London PGR Fund, workshop organisation, 2021. 

IFTR, travel bursary, 2020. 

Glynne Wickham Scholarship for international conference participation,  SCUDD, USA, November 2018.

Una Ellis-Fermor Travel Award, research/archive visit, USA, November 2018.

Royal Holloway, fully-funded PhD scholarship, associate of the TECHNE consortium, AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, Sept 2017-21.