Current PhD Projects

Scientific supervisor Univ.-Prof. Stefan Schmidl  
Artistic supervisor Univ.-Prof. Lars Seniuk 
Key Research Areas Interpretive Research, Composition/Music Theory

Biography
Philipp Gerschlauer is a renowned saxophonist, musician, and educator, known for his pioneering work in integrating microtonal elements into jazz music. He has divided the octave into 128 notes on both saxophone and within his compositions, pushing boundaries in the genre. In addition to his performances, Gerschlauer shares his expertise through teaching clinics, solidifying his reputation as a leading figure in microtonal saxophone.

Description of the doctoral project
My PhD project investigates the integration of microtonal tuning systems within Bebop, a jazz style known for its complex harmonies and improvisation. Microtonality refers to the use of pitches outside the standard 12-tone equal temperament tuning system. The project explores how these unconventional tunings can expand the harmonic and melodic vocabulary of Bebop, which traditionally relies on chromaticism and functional harmony but has not yet deeply engaged with microtonal possibilities beyond “blue notes.”

Research Questions
- How can microtonal tuning systems enhance Bebop’s harmonic and melodic structure?
- What new creative and stylistic possibilities can microtonality bring to jazz musicians?
- How can musicians practically implement microtonality in jazz performance (e.g., modified instruments, software)?
- How can microtonality be integrated into jazz education, and what are the implications for broader pedagogical practices?

Methods
I combine artistic practice with theoretical analysis. This includes studying Bebop standards, composing and improvising using microtonal scales, and collaborating with jazz musicians in practical ensemble settings. I will also conduct qualitative interviews with musicians to document their experiences working with microtonality. Recordings of these performances will form part of the research documentation.

Theoretical Framework
The project draws from Western music theory, particularly the study of historical tuning systems, and engages with the cultural significance of Bebop within African-American history. By blending European microtonal traditions with the Afro-American roots of jazz, this research contributes to the decolonization of music theory while also opening new avenues for artistic exploration.

Documentation
The research will be documented through audio and video recordings of performances, written transcriptions, and theoretical analyses. A blog will be used to share research developments, providing transparency and inviting feedback from the academic and artistic communities.
 

Scientific supervisor Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stefan Schmidl  
Artistic supervisor Univ.-Prof. Dr. Samuel Penderbayne
Key Research area Interpretive research

Biography
Veronica Klavzar, born in Bruneck, Italy, is a South Tyrolean harpist, performer and teacher who lives mainly in Vienna and works worldwide. She began harp lessons at the age of 5 and won various prizes at a young age. She graduated from the Conservatorio Claudio Monteverdi in Bolzano and later completed two master's degrees in Vienna with distinction (one in harp and one in music education). Veronica performs internationally in various ensembles (solo, chamber music, orchestra) and not only plays classical and contemporary music, but also explores the electronic harp with her own compositions, in which she uses singing, movement and other means of expression.

Description of the project: 
My doctoral project explores the electric harp as a modern and versatile instrument. While the harp is often associated with classical traditions and soft sounds, I am interested in showing as well its other sides – powerful, experimental, and innovative. By combining the harp with technology I want to expand its sound world and create new artistic possibilities.
A central focus of the project is collaboration. Together with composers, dancers, and visual artists, I would like to develop interdisciplinary performances where music meets movement, images, and digital media.
The project also reflects on how the harp has historically been tied to gendered stereotypes and has the goal to free the instrument from these associations.
Furthermore the project emphasizes openness and exchange with the audience. Workshops and participatory formats will be created, where people can experience the instrument in new ways. A digital platform will document the process through videos, recordings, and practical resources, making the research accessible for a broader public.
With Amplifying Horizons, I want to challenge the traditional view of the harp and invite the audience to discover its potential as a contemporary instrument.
 

Artistic Supervisor Univ.-Prof. Jean Beers
Scientific Supervisor Univ.-Prof. Susana Zapke
Key Research Areas Interpretive Research, Composition/Music Theory

Biography
Josef Lamell is an Austrian-American clarinetist and arranger, internationally sought after for his sensitive interpretations and diverse programming. He holds an M.A. in clarinet from the MUK, an M.M. in clarinet from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and a B.S. in computer science as well as a B.M. in clarinet performance from the University of Houston. Lamell has appeared as guest artist and given masterclasses at festivals and universities across the US, Europe and the Middle East. He is especially active in Austria and Belgium with Belgian pianist Nathalie Matthys as the Duo Lamell-Matthys and also appears on her recently-published album Picture Frame. As arranger, Lamell specializes in adapting a wide range of repertoire for the clarinet and for wind ensembles.

Description of the doctoral project
This project investigates musical tone as both an artistic and acoustic phenomenon, focusing on clarinet sound and the potential in leveraging modern recording technology to support its development in performance, practice and pedagogy. By employing techniques such as spectral pitch visualization and formant analysis, it explores supplementing a musician’s auditory conceptualization of sound with visual analogues and how this can further enhance the opportunities for self-analysis provided by recording as well as the pedagogy of tonal development.
This research aims to develop methodologies for the use of recording techniques which contribute to improved understanding of musical sound in general, as well as to more specific understanding of the nuances differentiating distinct traditions of clarinet playing and sound, while mitigating the inherent challenges posed by the asyncronicity of recording. It also examines how the widespread availability of recordings, global distribution and increasingly sophisticated sources of artificial audio are influencing musical aesthetics and how these pressures interact with applied practice as a performing musician. Ultimately, it seeks to develop a practical framework enabling musicians to apply modern technology more precisely in practice for cultivation of tone, to better understand characteristics of musical traditions as they relate to distinctive concepts of sound and to support artists in developing an individual musical voice.

 

Scientific supervisor Ass.-Prof. Rosemarie Brucher
Artistic supervisor Univ.-Prof. Alex Riener
Key Research area Contemporary Theatre

Biography
Tina Lorenz came of age in the Chaos Computer Club but went on to study theater studies and American literary history in Vienna and Munich. They were a lecturer for theater history at the Academy for Performing Arts Bavaria, later dramaturge at the Landestheater Oberpfalz and finally consultant for digital communication at the Staatstheater Nürnberg, before founding and leading the Digital Theatre department at the State Theatre of Augsburg from 2020 to 2023.

Tina Lorenz is a founding member of the hackspaces metalab Vienna and Binary Kitchen Regensburg; since January 2024, they head the department of artistic research and development »Hertzlab« at ZKM | Karlsruhe.

Description of the project
In my artistic research PhD I explore how theatre transforms when Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes an active live performer on stage. 
The project examines both the aesthetic and structural shifts required to integrate generative, non-human co-actors into performative contexts. 
A central focus lies on the processes of fine-tuning and retraining AI systems to enable meaningful interaction within theatrical practice, but also on the changes theatre would have to undergo to incorporate AI as a technology on stage. The work situates itself within the cultural history of spirit invocation in performance, from European séances to Korean mudang shamanism, and draws theoretical inspiration from theatre innovators such as Edward Gordon Craig and Antonin Artaud. The practical component is inseparably linked to the theoretical inquiry: a performance employing generative AI as a dramaturgical and ritual element, engaging with the uncanny, the spectral, and the boundaries between human and machine presence.
 

Scientific Supervision: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Eike Wittrock
Artistic Supervision: Univ.-Prof. Joonas Lahtinen PhD MA
Research Area: Performance Art

Biography
Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is an Iranian-Swedish artist whose practice is informed by political tensions in informal cultural spaces: at the dinner table or at mehmani—Iranian home parties—where voices interrupt each other and memories differ. These frictions shape his work, engaging with those who were not allowed to speak at the dinner table or whose political practices were dismissed as irrelevant. Nordlöf Malekian creates performances, installations and texts from their silenced language and those very moments when their quiet speech allows for the improbable or seemingly impossible to triumph against the very structures and regulations built to eliminate them. Against this backdrop, Nordlöf Malekian creates works that he wishes had existed in certain contexts, choreographing toward larger worlds of being together. 
Nordlöf Malekian has an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and an MA from the Dutch Art Institute. He has previously conducted artistic research at the Arab Image Foundation, was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In 2025 he was awarded the Maria Bonnier Dahlin grant. His work has been exhibited at venues including the 10th Berlin Biennale, Sophiensaele, Moderna Museet, and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius. Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is currently working on the social practice commission Dance Party Revolution: Oslo at UKS in Oslo as well as two public art commissions in Gothenburg, in collaboration with artist Theresa Traore Dahlberg, and Stockholm respectively that deal with sound and choreography.
 

Project description
This doctoral project asks through performance how Iranian home parties in Berlin and Vienna might joyfully unsettle nationalist futures and prohibitive traditions. Known as mehmani, these informal gatherings feature gender-fluid dancing from Qajar-era Iran (1795–1921), set to music largely produced in exile following the 1979 Revolution’s ban on dance music. I will conduct a practice-based artistic study with Iranian communities in Berlin and Vienna, tracing mehmani through dance classes, parties, choirs, family albums, videotapes, recipes, and oral histories. Guided by Asef Bayat’s concept of “social nonmovements” and theories of hybridisation, Dancy Party Revolution examines how political agency might form through this joyful practice, where dispersed communities confront exile and oppression through improvised dance and kitschy music. I will develop performances that draw directly on these kitschy, queer and gaudy materials. It is my contention that these specific parties challenge what has come to be accepted as political or progressive movements in the first place. My study will explore how productive it is to shift focus from dominant migration discourses of loss and violence toward learning from how migrant communities negotiate political expression through ‘joyforms’ of resistance via the making of alternative worlds. Amid the global rise of far-right politics, this research seeks to explore how other futures and histories can be collectively inhabited. What kind of migratory Iranian home party could throw the confines of nationalist traditions off beat?

Scientific Supervisor Univ-Prof. Dr. Eike Wittrock
Artistic Supervisor Univ.-Prof. Virginie Roy 
Key Research Area Contemporary Dance

Biography
René*e Reith (all pronouns) works as a choreographer, performance artist, and dance scholar. Her productions have been staged throughout Germany and internationally—for example, at Kampnagel (Hamburg), Ballhaus Ost (Berlin), and the Festival Temps d’M (Charleville-Mézières). 
Her queer-feminist perspective and the close connection between theory and practice have led to awards from the Research Prize of the Society for Dance Research, the Fritz Wortelmann Prize of the City of Bochum, and the Theater Prize of the Bürgerstiftung Hildesheim. As a lecturer in choreography and queer performance, she has taught at Stockholm University, the University of Hildesheim, Philipps University Marburg, and in the FSJ Kultur education program. She has used her expertise to advise projects at the Federal Academy for Cultural Education in Wolfenbüttel and as part of the Roundtable Gender Diversity of the Fonds Darstellende Künste. She co-organized the Working the Body conference at the University of Hildesheim and regularly publishes dance studies articles in various cultural studies and art forums. Reith studied Scenic Arts (B.A.) and Staging of Arts and Media (M.A.) at the University of Hildesheim as well as Dance and Performance Studies at Stockholm University. For her education and artistic work, she received, among other things, a scholarship from the Villigst Foundation, membership in the Robert Bosch Foundation's Freiwilligen Kolleg, and the stART.up scholarship from the Claussen-Simon Foundation. Her doctoral studies are funded by the Claussen-Simon Foundation's scholarship for scientific-artistic research and presented in cooperation with the international production house Kampnagel. Before her studies, Reith was a competitive dancer in Latin American ballroom dancing. 
 

Description of the PhD Project
René*e Reith conducts research on the (in)visibility of transness in contemporary dance and performance. (In)visibility is understood, on the one hand, as the spectrum of perceptual processes that complement, deconstruct, and subvert normative visual processes and, on the other hand, as a political demand for transvisibility in performance situations. 
Reith's research is based on the premise that bodies in dance and performance, as well as in research processes, should be understood as perceiving entities. On this basis, the research design builds on choreographic experimental setups and phenomenological investigations in which, for example, dance improvisation, somatic practice, experimental choreography, artistic audio description, dance notation, and rehearsal process analysis are applied in a complementary manner. 
Together with performers, research, analysis, and staging processes take place in which the research question is pursued: To what extent can the interdependence of visual processes and movements produce transness as representation-critical perception processes between bodies in contemporary choreographic practices?
The aim of the research project is to develop a contribution to trans-inclusive and representation-critical choreography, the criteria of which will be published both artistically and scientifically.

Scientific Supervision Ass.Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Brucher 
Artistic Supervision Univ.-Prof. Dr. Petra Kuppers, University of Michigan (extern)
Research Area Performance Art

Biography
Verena Stenke (she/they) is an artist-researcher, curator, and lecturer working internationally as VestAndPage. Their site-responsive performance art and films centre embodied and situated narratives, with a particular interest in the reciprocal influence of bodies and sites. Attentive to the silenced, obscured, latent, and immanent, they have worked with clinical, military, polar, subterranean, seismic, and other historically or ecologically critical sites. Their practice connects counternarratives with the ritual dimension of performance in contested and remote public spaces. Ranging from month-long performance walks and 24-hour durational works to temporary artistic visitations, VestAndPage's projects have been produced and presented internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Art Leipzig, MOCA Belgrade, Prague City Gallery, MAXXI National Museum Rome, MOCA Thessaloniki, Arnolfini Bristol, Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, and Taipei Artist Village. Alongside global exhibitions and research collaborations, Stenke is a lecturer in performance practice and artistic research at ArtEZ University of the Arts and Accademia Unidee. As the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Venice International Performance Art Week, she advances performance as a collaborative, social, and research practice. Their work appears in publications including The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science, Performance Research, Performance Matters, Journal of Embodied Research, and Undercurrents. They hold an MA in Performing Public Space and professional training in special FX makeup and mask making, as well as in Applied and Physical Theatre. / www.vest-and-page.de

Project description
My PhD project examines embodied and situated narratives of tuberculosis (TB) in public space through site-responsive performances at former Central European sanatoriums. It brings affected narratives into dialogue with these historical sites and the current global discourse and governance of TB. Although the World Health Organisation aims to end the tuberculosis epidemic by 2030, TB remains the world's deadliest infectious disease and is often regarded in Europe as a disease of the past. This artistic research project explores how tuberculosis continues to shape bodies, public space, and systems of governance. Using performance, embodied autotheoretical writing, documentary inquiry, and film, the project asks how site-responsive practices can narrate suppressed histories and lived experiences of tuberculosis to generate new forms of public discourse. I revisit former sanatoriums as places where medicine, clinical isolation, and social control remain embedded in architecture and landscape. The project draws on the philosophical and sociological concept of hauntology and the medical humanities. By developing hauntological methodologies, it aims to establish embodied artistic forms of historical accountability towards the effects of biomedical and social governance. Focusing on three sanatoriums in Germany, Austria, and Poland, I examine how the lived experience, stigma, and political structures of TB resonate over time and space. The research results in a performance-based documentary film and a written dissertation.

Supervisors
Univ-Prof. Dr. Eike Wittrock
Univ.-Prof.in Dr.in Stefanie Wenner
Key Research Areas Performance Art, Contemporary Theatre

Felizitas Stilleke
is a dramaturge, curator, dream activist and radio maker. Her focus is on queer-feminist aesthetics and collective knowledge. Across dramaturgy, performance, radio and artistic research, her practice develops political futures beyond fixed forms.

For over seventeen years, she has worked as a dramaturge for theatre, dance and performance, developing festivals, series, and conferences. She is drawn to formats that open up, shift perspectives and raise questions collectively. Cities, stages, parties or gatherings function for her as laboratories and resonance spaces.

Her work moves between dramaturgy and multimedia practice, between performance, academia and deep hanging sessions, between mind and body, analysis and intuition. Since 2020, she has worked extensively with radio and podcasts. In autofictional sessions, she addresses topics such as divorce, non-/maybe-motherhood, her father's dementia or sibling dynamics, giving voice to the in-between, the unfinished, the contradictory.

Currently, she is working on oracles and collective dream work that spin futures from intuition, memory, and radical imagination. Her practice connects critical analysis with artistic experimentation, political sharpness with sensuous experience, research with performative implementation.

EIGHT BONES — Oracling as an Aesthetic Practice (WT)
Tarot, dream interpretation and divination are surging again in unsettled times. But whose knowledge gets to surge and whose has simply never stopped existing? Eight Bones (WT) takes the oracle seriously: not as trend, but as a performative practice through which the present is questioned toward its futures and aesthetics are made. Four oracular forms anchor the research: dreamwork, tarot, rivers and techno, read as spaces of collective practice.

The research moves along the Balkans to Delphi, onward to India and Mexico, gathering cosmologies of oracling and their artistic forms. Not as extraction but as encounter. The oracle belongs to the marginalized, the queers, the subcultures and all those who have always spoken from the in-between of knowing and not-knowing. Where the center makes no room for certainty, other archives emerge: in dreams, on dancefloors, in the shared and ever-transforming.

The project culminates in an interdisciplinary festival as a meeting place for collective oracular practices.

Artistic Supervisor Univ.-Prof. Dr. Samuel Penderbayne
Scientific Supervisor Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wiebke Rademacher
Key Research Area Cultural Mediation

Biography
Theresa Wagner is a violist specializing in contemporary and improvised music. She is co-founder of eineArtEnsemble e.V., Percaso String Quartet and eineArtFestival Freiburg. Wagner worked in the music education department of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks in Munich and teaches at the music universities in Freiburg and Karlsruhe.

Description of the PhD Project
Theresa Wagner explores the “in-between” in concerts with her two founded ensembles, the transition between compositions or improvisations and shapes it as an independent artistic moment that invites interaction, reflection and new forms of musical expression. Her artistic research focuses on how this moment of transition can be consciously designed as an aesthetic space of tension and how it can transform the concert experience, opening up new modes of perception for performers and audiences alike.