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The Department of German Studies at èצӰÏñ welcomes Elena Zanichelli as the 2021-22 Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor in Spring Quarter 2022.

Elena Zanichelli is a Berlin-based art historian, critic, and curator. She is junior professor for Art History and Aesthetic Theory at IKFK (Institute for Art History – Film History – Art Education) at the University of Bremen. Since 2021, she is also co-director of the Mariann Steegmann Institute. Art & Gender and a member of the dwelling +/- exhibiting research group. Her research interests include the intersections between (contemporary) art and feminism, visual culture and the value and consumption of privacy in the arts, media representations of the postfamilial family. She engages with a variety of artistic works, both historic and contemporary, that allow for investigating the interconnections between (both American and European) social relations and institutional structures.

Elena studied art history and cultural heritage conservation at the University of Parma with visiting scholarships at the Universities of Bonn, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland, before receiving her doctorate from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany (2012). Apart from her research and teaching work at various universities, including an Inter artes guest professorship at the University of Cologne 2018 and a visiting professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden 2017, she has worked on numerous exhibition projects, including the documenta 12 (Kassel, Germany 2007). Her curations include Women in Fluxus and Other Experimental Tales – Eventi Partiture Performance (Reggio Emilia, Italy 2012/13); Fake or Feint – six scenarios on tactics of marking – scenario three: films (with Jörg Franzbecker, Berlin arsenal cinema for film and video art 2009); Jean-Jacques Lebel – Dada Venus (Berlin Haus am Waldsee 2000). She is currently a board member of the Kuratorium of the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States.

Her first book, Privat – bitte eintreten! Rhetoriken des Privaten in der Kunst der 1990er Jahre (Private – please enter! Rhetorics of Privacy in the Arts of the Nineties) was published by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, in 2015. She has also published widely in journals and anthologies. She is currently co-editing (with Valeria Schulte-Fischedick) a major volume on Formlessness in the Arts: Form in Trouble. For FKW// Journal for Gender Studies and Visual Culture, she is co-editing the winter special issue no. 70 (2021/2022), how :// do we speak #feminism?// new global challenges.

Elena’s current research project is titled Family Values – on the visual re-articulation of a rather conflictual model.