Anna-Lena Werner (she/her) is a researcher, writer and curator, focusing on the political potential of the arts for knowledge production, forming alliances and informing societal thinking. In her current post doc research she explores artistic deconstructions of the image politics of war. From 2019-2024 she was member of staff at the Institute for Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, working as post doc researcher, supervisor and representative of the seminar for Culture and Media Management. Having studied Art History, Theatre Studies and Art Theory in London and Berlin, she completed her Ph.D. "Let Them Haunt Us. How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable" (transcript, Bielefeld 2020) in 2019 at FU Berlin. Continuing this research, she currently co-directs the discursive series On(going) Trauma (2024/25) at Vierte Welt Berlin.
Since 2013, she has (co-)conducted research projects between academia and cultural institutions, including a workshop on "The Quality of Slownesses in Expanded Neural Networks" with the EER group (Studio Eliasson & Aarhus University, DK) and metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin (2024). As a member of EXC2020: Temporal Communities, she organized the workshop “Counter Narratives and Resilience in Practice: On Decolonial Strategies in Art and Communities” (2022) and A Video Series on Performance and Communities (2020) in collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin. From 2018-20 she co-directed the research project Invitations – Archive as Event, between FU Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and HKW, Berlin and was research associate for Black Mountain Research (2013-16), a collaboration between FU Berlin and Hamburger Bahnhof. She is founding editor of the interview-based online journal artfridge.de and contributes texts to magazines, such as Monopol and CAPITAL. She curated exhibitions at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Archiv Massiv (Leipzig), DZIALDOV (Berlin) and Blok Art Space (Istanbul) amongst others, as well as she co-initiated the curatorial collectives point project and DIE BUEHNE.
anna [at] annalenawerner.de