Dr. Isabel Hufschmidt
© Universität Münster | Stefan Klatt

Dr. Isabel Hufschmidt is a German art historian and curator. She lives and works in Vienna. From 2001 to 2006 she studied art history and Romance philology at the University of Cologne, where she completed her doctorate in 2009 with a study on the commercialization of 19th-century small-scale French sculpture. Her research interests include provenance and collection research, museum history, technological and media transformation in art and cultural production, sculpture and new media art, digitality and AI in cultural institutions, gender equality in historiographies as well as queer and decolonial strategies.

In her current projects, she deals with the description and deconstruction of normativity and global power relations in the context of narratives, terminologies and institutional practice. The objective is to contribute to the development of transdisciplinary methods and practices of access and participation that explore society and cultural heritage in the interplay of change and continuity.

Isabel Hufschmidt has been working as a curator, researcher and journalist since 2007. Her professional path has included various tenures in galleries and exhibition venues, in research operations and the museum sector, as well as a lecturer at universities in Germany and abroad. In 2013 she was a Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. From 2016 to 2020 she took on the role as curator for Research, Academic Cooperation and Provenance Research at Museum Folkwang, Essen. From 2021 to 2023 she was a Senior Scientist for Expanded Museum Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2023 she was selected for the Female Postdoc Mentoring Program of the University of Vienna and received the Research Grant of the City of Vienna for the project “Provenance: Migrations of a Concept” as well as a grant from the German Centre for Venetian Studies in Venice in 2024.

As a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study, she is working on her latest project “Ur & Alexandria: Counter-Narrating Museum History”. The aim is to develop a counter-narrative to the prevailing museum history to contribute to the deconstruction of Eurocentrism and gender bias in museum historiography. Deep mapping plays a key role in the project’s methodological approach to connect global historical contexts, cultural heritage practices and geospatial data, and ultimately visualizing them in a virtual atlas.

Recent publications and projects: