Training Creative Acts and Action

T.J. Demos holds the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the founding director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at UCSC. Demos is the author of numerous books, including Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2023) and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017).

Stephanie R. Dvareckas is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Rutgers University. She is a Dodge Avenir Fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum where she works with the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Her work is supported by a fellowship from the Fulbright Scholars Program (Kazakhstan, 2022-23), a Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from Harvard University’s Davis Center (2019), and a Graduate Dean Professional Development Award (2018). Stephanie holds an MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Knut Ebeling is a media theorist whose work focuses on a material epistemology of the arts and knowledge. His research interests include modern and contemporary philosophy, cultural aesthetics and aesthetic theory, media of cultural memory, media archaeology, and the archaeology of contemporary art and knowledge. In 2009, Ebeling was appointed professor at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. His publications include Der Krieg im Kopf. Meditieren mit Bataille (Matthes & Seitz, 2024), Sorge. Autotheorie der Trauer (textem Verlag, 2021), and Wilde Archäologien I and II (Kadmos, 2012 and 2016).

Aliz Farkas is a visual artist and art historian. Her interdisciplinary practice—spanning painting, photo, and experimental textile work—investigates the intersection of myth and everyday life, and the dynamics between individual and community practices. She earned her degree in Painting from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2022 and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at Eötvös Loránd University. In 2024 and 2025, she was an artist-in-residence at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. She has contributed to exhibitions at the Hopp Ferenc Museum of Asiatic Arts and the Kiscelli Museum, and her writing appears in journals such as Új Művészet and Balkon. In 2025, she was a guest lecturer on textile practices at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Germany. She is a member of the Studio of Young Artists Association and regularly participates in interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of art and social work.

Isa Fontbona is a performance artist, academic researcher, and bodybuilder. Her career focuses on using the body as a creative material to stimulate critical thought on issues that affect us as individuals in post/hypermodern society. Her works challenge the limits of her body, employing physical effort to penetrate the audience.

Anna Helfer is a Ph.D. candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin and the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). Her research focuses on art, memory, and postcolonial critique, and she has been conducting fieldwork in Dakar since 2018. From March 2024 to February 2025, she was a research associate at the Department of African Art at the Art History Institute of Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2023, she has been a member of the project Re-connecting “Objects” (TU Berlin), which was presented at Dak’Art 2024. From 2015 to 2017, she worked on the Café Deutschland oral history project at the Städel Museum, conducting interviews with key figures of the postwar German art scene. She currently teaches at the Institute of African Art at Freie Universität Berlin and holds a doctoral fellowship from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

Marie Götze works with industrial traces accumulating in more-than-human bodies as touching, contaminating & transforming guises. Her installative, performative, conceptual & textile art practice connects within underground networks, merging nourishing, extractive & resisting tendencies.

Alex Gross, visual artist and PhD in art theory, has been working at the Chair of Visual Arts, Institute of Architecture at TU Berlin since 2010. His artistic practice focuses on destabilising material processes as key agents in sculptural and performative interventions. At the Institute of Architecture, he develops and implements experimental teaching formats that focus on material-based artistic research and performative inquiry.

Cyrill Lim, a multimedia artist and researcher, and Daria Nedelcu, an emerging curator and art historian, began collaborating in 2022. Their joint practice intersects art, research and social engagement.

Johanne Mohs studied Romance languages and literatures, art history and journalism at the University of Hamburg and the University of Barcelona. From 2007 to 2010 she held seminars on French and Spanish literature at the University of Hamburg and since 2010 she works first as a doctoral candidate and than as a postdoctoral researcher at the Bern University of the Arts. Since 2020 she works as an independent researcher with institutions like the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Kunstmuseum Olten or the Literaturhaus Berlin and as a lecturer at the Technische Universität Berlin. Her research interests include intermediality between literature and photography, poetics of European Avant-gardes (especially Tel Quel and OuLiPo), material aesthetics, collaborative writing cultures, and the interplay of art/literature, technology and science.

Nina Nielebock is an artist specializing in sculpture and performance in public space. In her art, she deals with contemporary politics and explores their impact on society in participatory performances. She studies under Sam Durant at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. Nina Nielebock also works as an art educator, organizes discussions at the interface of art and politics and organizes group exhibitions.

Göze Saner received her PhD in 2009 through a practice-based research project on archetypes while simultaneously developing a solo theater practice centered on social engagement. Her research and body-based work explore how training tools for solo performers can be conceived as an independent form of critical pedagogy. Until the summer of 2024, she served as Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of Research for artistic PhD candidates at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Peter Seeland is a Master’s student in Art History at LMU Munich. His research focuses on ecological and ecocritical perspectives in the history of art and conteporary art, with an emphasis on visual culture, landscape, and historical resource relations.

Nora Sternfeld is Professor of Art Education at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK). Previously, she served as documenta Professor in Kassel (2018–2020) and Professor of Curating and Mediating Art at Aalto University in Helsinki (2012–2018). She also co-directs the /ecm – Master’s Program in Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is a member of schnittpunkt. exhibition theory & practice, a co-founder of trafo.K (Office for Education, Art, and Critical Knowledge Production, Vienna), and freethought (a platform for research, education, and production, London). Sternfeld has published extensively on contemporary art, educational theory, exhibitions, politics of history, and anti-racism.

Verena Straub is an art and image historian at TU Dresden. Her research focuses on contemporary art, images in the context of political agitation and online visual culture. She is co-leader of the research project Image Protests on Social Media and a cofounder of the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab.

Irène Unholz is a PhD student at the University of Fribourg (CH), investigating strategies of simulating and reproducing systems in contemporary art. She studied Art History, Media Research, and Psychology at the University of Fribourg and FU Berlin. Alongside, she contributes as a cultural journalist.

Georg Winter lives in Völklingen, Stuttgart, and Budapest. In temporary laboratories, urban situations, self-organizing performances, and training sets, the sculptor develops research projects that define a cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary field of work. Starting from his concept of the “University in a Suitcase,” Winter has taught since 1994 at institutions including the University of Stuttgart, Merz Academy Stuttgart, Zurich University of the Arts, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, and since 2007 at HBKsaar. Winter has co-founded numerous cooperatives, including forschungsgruppe_f (Zurich), Arbeitsgemeinschaft Retrograde Strategien (Berlin), Urban Research Institutes (Nuremberg), S_A_R Project Office (Völklingen), AG AST – Working Group on Anastrophal Cities, Volume V (Mannheim), and TanzPflanzPlan.