Lukas Bärfuss is a Swiss playwright and novelist, essayist and dramaturge. His plays are performed worldwide, and his novels have been translated into twenty languages. He received the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, the Berliner Literaturpreis, the Schweizer Buchpreis, and the Georg Büchner Preis. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. Bärfuss is a lecturer of dramaturgy at Bern University of the Arts. He curates and hosts the series “The Future of Democracy” at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg theatre. His latest novel “Die Krume Brot” (“The Crumb of Bread”), was published by Rowohlt Verlag.
Jenifer Becker is an author, literary scholar and cultural scientist living in Berlin. She writes about the ambivalence of the digital world, contemporary phenomena and pop culture. Her debut novel, “Zeiten der Langeweile” (Times of Boredom), was published by Hanser Berlin in 2023. Since 2015, she has been teaching at the Literature Institute Hildesheim. In 2021, she received her doctorate there. In her current artistic-scientific projects, she is researching the influence of adaptive technologies (AI) on writing processes.
Friedrich von Borries has been a professor at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg since 2009. He researches the relationship between society and design, deals with sustainability and the possibilities of social transformation, and operates in the field of tension between architecture, design, and art. In his current research project “Re•De•Re”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, he is investigating the redesign of democratic representation.
CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return” (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Literary Award. “The Book of Frank” is available in nine different languages, most recently French and Italian, andthey coedited “SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners” (Wave Books). They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. https://CAConrad.com
Jason Dodge is an artist and has been a substitute professor of sculpture at the HFBK Hamburg since 2024. He has been making exhibitions in galleries, museums, biennials, art centers, and artist run spaces since the late 1990’s. In 2012 Dodge founded and continues to edit the poetry imprint “Fivehundred places”. Recent exhibitions of his work have been held at MUDAM, Luxemburg, (2024), Grazer Kunstverein (2024), MACRO, Rome (2021), or Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2017), among others. Dodge co-curated “Enemy of the Stars” with Krist Gruijthuijsen at KW Institute, Berlin (2017), and has participated in biennials in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, Porto Alegre and the current Baltic Triennial.
Sophia Eisenhut is an artist and author whose work deals with the performance and materiality of writing. She studied art history, typography and fine arts in Leipzig. Her books are published by Merve Verlag, including her debut “EXERCITIA S. Catarinae de Manresa: Anorexia and Theocracy” (2021) and most recently “SPAM IN ALIUM” (2025).
Elisa Linseisen has been Professor of Film and Media Studies at the HFBK Hamburg since 2024 with a focus on the aesthetics and epistemology of the digital. Previously, Linseisen taught and researched at media studies institutes in Hamburg, Vienna, Weimar, Paderborn and Bochum and completed a PhD on “High Definition: Media-Philosophical Image Processing” (meson.press 2020). Elisa Linseisen’s research and teaching interests include, among others, theories of application, digital images, post-cinema, queer computing, unfinished films, philosophy of media and technology, and canon criticism.
Hanne Loreck is professor of Art and Cultural Sciences / Gender Studies and a member of the department of Theory and History at the HFBK Hamburg. She is also a freelance author and art critic. Her research specialisms are subject theory, issues connected with aesthetic-political acts and questions of visibility, imagery, and surfaces.
Vera Lutz is an artist. Her recent exhibitions include Kunstverein München, Momenta Biennale, Montreal, and Gallery Raven Row, London. She is the co-organizer of the ongoing reading series “a poetics” at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin. Lutz edited and published the “Anna Mendelssohn Reader” (2023) a publication dedicated to the work of the British poet and artist and her “anti-confessional life writing”.
Enis Maci is a writer, essayist and playwright. Suhrkamp Verlag has published several of her works, including “Eiscafé Europa” (2018), “Wunder” (2021) and “Karl May” (2024, with Mazlum Nergiz) as well as “Pando” (2024, with Pascal Richmann). Enis Maci was a Villa Aurora scholarship holder and has received numerous awards for her essays and plays, including the Max Frisch Förderpreis, the Förderpreis für Literatur des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and the Literaturpreis Ruhr.
Astrid Mania has been holding the new professorship for art criticism and modern art history at HFBK Hamburg since 2017. In this capacity, she is largely responsible for HFBK’s first year as well as international students. Previously, she was visiting professor at the Kunstakademie Münster and held teaching positions at various international art schools. Working as an independent art critic, she publishes on modern and contemporary art, the art market, and the history of art criticism. In 2013, she received the ADKV – Art Cologne award for art criticism.
Katrin Mayer is an artist. She works individually and collaboratively with a focus on site specificity, gender issues, polyphony, textile and textual structures, and topological concepts of thinking and space – most recently for Kunstverein München, Lentos Museum Linz, Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe (all 2024). In the period 2020/2021, she received a scholarship from the Berlin Artistic Research Programme and researched female modes of programming and writing. Together with Anna Cairns, she developed the ongoing publishing platform www.c0da.org
Noemi Y. Molitor studied gender studies and European ethnology in Berlin and the USA and received her doctorate at Emory University at the intersection of queer theory, abstract painting and materiality. Molitor’s artistic practice moves between painting, comics and installation/space. She researches and teaches on queer art, postcolonial imagery, gender queerness and childhood/ memory. Her texts and columns have appeared in taz, BE, CURA, Missy and Sissy, among others. In 2025, Molitor was awarded the ADKV – Art Cologne Prize for Art Criticism. In the same year, she was shortlisted for the Siegfried Kracauer Prize for Film Criticism.
Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and now lives in both New York and Berlin. His latest book of poetry, “The Feeling Sonnets”, published in 2022 by Carcanet in the UK and by NYRB Poets in the US, examines the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, “The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi” (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck as “Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt” (kookbooks 2017), it won the 2019 Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. An acclaimed translator of poetry and formerly a writer-in-residence at Humboldt University and EXC2020 Temporal Communities in Berlin, Ostashevsky teaches at New York University.
Max Prediger is a graphic designer specialising in typography, book design, visual systems and artist books. His work is predominantly created in the context of art, culture and knowledge. After completing his Master of Fine Arts at the HFBK Hamburg, he founded the design studio JMMP together with Julian Mader in 2017. Together, they are responsible for the art direction of Montez Press (London/New York) and work on individual projects in cooperation with artists, galleries and cultural institutions. www.jmmp.studio
Cemile Sahin is an artist and filmmaker. She studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is an ars viva prize winner for visual arts and is represented by the Esther Schipper Gallery. Cemile Sahin’s artistic practice moves between film, photography, sculpture and literature. Through the free use of various media, her work embodies the synchronicity of image- and text-based communication today. “Taxi” was her debut novel, “Alle Hunde sterben” (All Dogs Die) her second, and “Kommando Ajax” her third. Cemile Sahin was awarded the Alfred Döblin Medal in 2020 for her writing, and in 2025 she received the Erich Fried Prize.
Sasha Marianna Salzmann is a prose and theatre writer, essayist, dramaturge and curator. Salzmann was co-editor of the culture and society magazine freitext, resident writer at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin and artistic director of the Studio Я theatre. Both Salzmann’s debut “Außer sich” (2017) and her second novel “Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein” (2021) have been translated into numerous languages, won many awards and were nominated for the German Book Prize. Salzmann’s plays, which are performed internationally, were most recently awarded the Kunstpreis Berlin 2020, the Ludwig-Mülheims-Theaterpreis 2024 and the Kleist-Preis 2024.
Daniela Seel is an author, translator and publisher at kookbooks, and occasionally teaches. She has published four volumes of poetry and a radio feature, most recently “Nach Eden. Gedicht” (Suhrkamp 2024). In 2016, she and Anja Bayer co-edited the groundbreaking anthology “all dies hier, Majestät, ist deins. Lyrik im Anthropozän” (All This Here, Majesty, Is Yours: Poetry in the Anthropocene), kookbooks and Deutsches Museum Munich. She has translated books by Robert Macfarlane, Anne Boyer, Amanda Gorman and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, among others. She was most recently awarded the Kleist Prize 2025. Daniela Seel is a member of PEN Berlin.
Charlie Stein is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and cultural theorist. With a background in sociology and fine arts, Stein explores the transitions between physical and virtual space, between craft and machine, and between the individual and systemic structures. She has participated in both international and national exhibitions, including Manifesta 11, Kunsthalle CCA Andratx, the Sculpture Triennial in Bingen, as well as exhibitions in museums across Europe and Asia. She is a Fellow of the ISCP program in New York and has held teaching appointments and guest professorships at institutions such as CalArts (Paul Brach Visiting Scholar), the Pratt Institute, the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), and the HFBK Hamburg.
King Tóth is an artist and sound poet who combines her texts with objects, video and sound installations, and also performs them. With her diverse vocal technique, she creates a choir of body sounds, texts in different languages, machine noises and elements from folk songs. In addition to her research on the art of nuns, the artist experiments with rituals, physical, linguistic and spiritual exercises, and the concept of silence to find out whether ‘the word’ can actually be brought to life. In 2024, Tóth was a DAAD artist; she is currently a guest of the MQ art programme in Vienna. Her next book, “MariaMachina”, featuring graphics and sounds, will be published by Matthes&Seitz in 2026. www.kingatoth.com
Senthuran Varatharajah is a German author and essayist born in Sri Lanka. He studied philosophy, Protestant theology and comparative religious and cultural studies in Marburg, Berlin and London. His first novel, “Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen” (Before the Increase of Signs), was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2016 and received several awards. His second novel, “Rot (Hunger)”, was published in 2022. Varatharajah taught theory and creative writing at the Berlin University of the Arts, the University of Hildesheim and the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. In 2025, he was a Max Kade Scholar and Writer in Residence at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Mathias Zeiske works as a curator, editor and publisher. From 2009 to 2017, he was managing director and editor of the literary magazine Edit. He is associated with Spector Books through the publication of the series ‘Volte’ and ‘Volte Expanded’. From 2019 to 2022, he headed the literature programme at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) before taking over as head of literature and film in the DAAD’s Berlin Artists Programme in June 2022. Since 2021, he has been producing the literary audio project “Schlechte Wörter / Bad Words” together with Fabian Saul. In 2025, he realised the exhibition and event programme “For Real For Real” in Berlin with Claudia Rankine and The Racial Imaginary Institute.
Steffen Zillig is an artist, critic and exhibition curator. He studied and obtained his doctorate at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, co-founded “Donnerstag” and has been publishing the artist magazine “Intercity” since 2017. Between 2022 and 2025, he ran the Briefing Room in Brussels together with Andrzej Steinbach. He was a research assistant at the Berlin University of the Arts and currently teaches at the University of the Arts in Bremen. “Ästhetik des Asozialen” (Aesthetics of the Anti-Social) was published by Starfruit Publications in 2023, followed by his anthology “Nie wieder Gegenwart” (Never Again the Present) by Textem Verlag in 2026.