Anna-Lena Werner (she/her) is a researcher and curator whose work examines the political and collaborative potentials of art, the representation of trauma, and artistic counter-images to the visual politics of conflict. In 2026, she received the Art History Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which will be hosted by PASS – Center for Practice-Based Research at the University of Copenhagen from 2027-29. Currently a guest lecturer at the institute for art history at Humboldt University Berlin, she was previously postdoctoral researcher at the centre for artistic research at MUK, Vienna and member of staff at the Institute for Theatre Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, serving on the MA in Culture and Media Management. Educated in Performance Studies and Art Theory in London and Berlin, she completed her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin with Let Them Haunt Us: How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable (transcript, 2020). Continuing this line of inquiry, she co-curated the discursive series On(going) Trauma (2024/25) at Vierte Welt, Berlin.
She was curator at Archiv der Avantgarden – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden for the inter-institutional research project Einladung – Archiv als Ereignis, co-edited its publication (Spector Books, 2025) and its online platform ada-invitations.de. Anna collaborated with various institutions and clusters including EXC 2020: Temporal Communities; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin; EER (Studio Olafur Eliasson / Aarhus University); metaLAB (at) Harvard; Haus der Kulturen der Welt; Goethe-Institut Brazil and Depot Basel. A member of AICA Germany, she is founding editor of the online art magazine artfridge.de and contributes to magazines including International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Performance Research, Stedelijk Studies, Monopol Magazin, and Capital. She has curated exhibitions at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Archiv Massiv (Leipzig), DZIALDOV (Berlin), and Blok Art Space (Istanbul), and co-initiated the curatorial collective DIE BUEHNE with Lea Schleiffenbaum.
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