Since March 2017, I am curator of the Humboldt Laboratory, Humboldt University’s interdisciplinary exhibition space in the Humboldt Forum. Based at HU’s Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques, my colleagues and I work together with a broad range of scholars as well as students in preparation for the opening exhibition. Additionally, I am responsible for the long-term strategic planning of HU’s exhibitions and programs in the Forum.

I was trained as Cultural Anthropologist/European Ethnologist at HU Berlin and UC Berkeley. For my PhD I undertook a 5-year ethnographic study about the Humboldt Forum’s planning process, published 2016 as Das Humboldt-Forum. Eine Ethnografie seiner Planung (Kadmos Verlag). Here, I was interested in how the different actors involved situate themselves in the broader postcolonial debates on ethnographic museum collections, and what an ethnographic perspective on the project’s “making of” reveals about the cultural politics at play. From 2009 to 2015 I was lecturer and research associate at the Institute of European Ethnology and the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at HU. I was also a founding member of the Museumslabor, which is now based at CARMAH. Amongst other contributions in the field of museum studies, I co-edited Museum^X. Zur Neuvermessung eines mehrdimensionalen Raumes (Panama Verlag, 2011, 2^nd edition 2012).

Prior to my engagement as curator for HU, I regularly served as co-curator and advisor to exhibitions and museums, e.g. at Stadtmuseum Berlin Foundation and the Humboldt Lab Dahlem (State Museums Berlin/Prussian Heritage Foundation). In 2015/16 I was member of the planning staff of the new City Museum of Stuttgart and subsequently worked as Senior Consultant in a PR- und communications agency in Basel (Switzerland), where I primarily worked on large-scale city planning and infrastructural projects. In my current curatorial work, research and teaching I am especially interested in the entanglements between exhibition practice and research – a focus of research for which the close cooperation with CARMAH is of course specifically fruitful!