Barbara Clausen is Rector of the Städelschule and Director of Portikus in Frankfurt Germany. From 2020 to 2024 Clausen was Vice Dean for Research and Creation at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Québec in Montreal (UQAM), Canada where she has been a professor of contemporary art and performance in the art history department since 2011.
Clausen has lectured and written extensively on the historiography and institutionalization of performance-based art practices and the discourses surrounding the politics of the body, the exhibition, and the archive. Over the last twenty years she has curated numerous exhibitions and performance seris in Europe and North America, such as Thin Skin (2002-2004) with ICI New York, or After the Act (2005), Again and Against (2006) and Push and Pull I & 2 (2010-2012) in collaboration with mumok (Museum of Modern Art Stiftung Ludwig) and tanzquartier in Vienna and TATE Modern in London. After moving to Canada in 2012 she curated the first retrospective of Babette Mangolte at VOX in 2013, followed in 2016 by the exhibition Joan Jonas, From Away and performance series Affinities featuring the work of Rosa Barba, Simone Forti, Joan Jonas, Jason Moran, Tanya Lukin Linklater, taisha paggett and Lawrence Weiner at the Phi Foundation in Montreal. Since 2014 she has directed research projects that focus on archival and performance-based forms of collaboration and community building such as An Annotated Bibliography in Realtime: Performance Art in Quebec and Canada (2014-2019) at Artexte in Montreal. From 2017-2021 she was the Curatorial Research Director of the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base in collaboration with the Artist Archives Initiative in New York.
