Dr. Barbara Clausen is Associate Professor for contemporary art and performance in the art history department at the University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM) and an independent curator. Since 2000 she has lectured and written extensively on the historiography and institutionalization of performance-based art practices and the parallel discourses surrounding the politics of the body and the archive, articulated through the site specificity of the exhibition. In 2010 Clausen received her PhD from the University of Vienna, Austria and has over the last ten years curated and collaborated on numerous exhibitions and performance series in Europe as well as North America, including After the Act The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art (2005) and Wieder und Wider / Again and Against:  (2006) as well as thet exhibition and performance series Push and Pull I and II (2010-2011) at mumok (Museum of Modern Art Stiftung Ludwig), the Tanzquartier in Vienna as well as TATE Modern in London. In 2016 she curated the first Canadian exhibition of Joan Jonas’ work, entitled From Away and the event series Affinities at DHC / Art and Phi Centre in Montreal. 
Since 2014 Clausen is the director of FRQSC funded research project An Annotated Bibliography in Realtime: Performance Art in Quebec and Canada (2014-2019) as well as her current research project Keeping it Live (2018 - 2022), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). She is the Curatorial Research Director of the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base, which is part of The Artists Archive Initiative at New York University (2017-2020) in collaboration Glenn Wharton (Museum Studies) and Denna Engel (Computer Science). She is a co-applicant member of Hexagram UQAM Network in Montreal, and, next to her research association with the ZeM in 2018/2019, a Visiting Research Fellow at TATE Britain and a Visiting Scholar at the programme for Museum Studies at NYU from 2018 - 2020.     
 Barbara Clausen’s research is dedicated to thinking about performance’s representational politics as a hybrid art form in the tension field of the live and the mediated.  One of her main objectives is to study the political and cultural impact of live and performance based art practices in the visual arts as an increasingly fluid medial entity that oscillates between affect driven agency and conceptual site-specificity - asking how the ecologies and networks of artistic interests, curatorial choices, and institutional and ideological politics at play, are anchored in the reality and imaginary of the exhibition as a liminal site, fed by the desire for immediacy and authentic experience as much as driven by the instability of the archive and the projected accessibility of the infinite.

keywords that highlight my research interests
Contemporary Art and Performance, Curating, historiography, institutionalization of performance-based art practices, parallel discourses surrounding the politics of the body and the archive
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Blurb of University
​UQAM is a dynamic, open, creative university with an international outreach. It is recognized for the originality and quality of its programs, its cutting-edge research, solidly grounded in social concerns, and its innovation in the arts.The Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) is a French-language university. UQAM offers more than 300 study programs in seven main areas: arts, communications, education, management, political science and law, science, and social sciences. Many of these programs are unique in Quebec, Canada and North America. Each year, UQAM welcomes more than 3,500 foreign students from 90 countries. It also maintains several centers for international research, including the Montreal Institute of International Studies. Over the years, UQAM has established agreements with over 380 institutions in 63 countries, in addition to the numerous links created through its membership in international university networks. UQAM is ranked 1st in Quebec and 6th in Canada in terms of research funding for comprehensive universities (Research Infosource, 2018). The University’s researchers, working in more than a hundred research and creative units, are awarded numerous prizes and distinctions each year.
Innovation has been central to the mission of UQAM, a pioneer in the development of many fields of study not traditionally found in an academic setting. It has unique areas of expertise that have contributed to its institutional identity, notably in public relations, actuarial science, sexology, social law, design and visual arts, feminist studies, and social economy, not to mention its advances in health and in Earth and atmospheric sciences.
UQAM’s central campus and its Pierre-Dansereau Science Complex are located in the heart of two of central Montreal’s liveliest districts: the Quartier Latin and the Quartier des spectacles. 

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