Anna-Lena Werner (she/her) is a researcher, writer, 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 war. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at MUK, Vienna. From 2019 to 2025 she was a member of staff at the Institute for Theatre Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, serving on the MA in Culture and Media Management. Educated in Theatre 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 and performative series On(going) Trauma (2024/25) at Vierte Welt, Berlin. From 2018-20 she was curator at Archiv der Avantgarden – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Werner is a member of the Cluster of Excellence: Temporal Communities (EXC 2020) and has collaborated with academic and cultural institutions including Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin; Studio Olafur Eliasson / Aarhus University; metaLAB (at) Harvard; Haus der Kulturen der Welt; and the Goethe-Institut Brazil. She is founding editor of the interview platform artfridge.de and contributes to 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.
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