Freda Fiala

writer, researcher and curator focused on performance-based artistic practices

Freda Fiala is a writer, researcher and curator focusing on performance-based artistic practices. She is a fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She studied Theatre and Chinese Studies at the University of Vienna, the Free University of Berlin, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National Taiwan University, is a graduate of the Austrian Academy for Applied Photography and is currently studying Cultural Management at the IKK. Her research focuses on contemporary performance cultures in East Asia from an intercultural perspective and through the lens of curatorial practice. She is the initiator and curator of perfoörm, a performance format in the museum space of OK Linz. In 2022 she initiated the performance festival Non-fungible Body? together with River Lin. She teaches performance theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Vienna. She has worked as a theory mentor at the P.A.R.T.S. School for Contemporary Dance in Brussels and as a dramaturge for the Taipei Fringe Festival.

She is board member of AAC (Austrian Association of Curators) and board member of the Anti-Racism Committee of the Association for Asian Performance. Her writing has been published by DISTANZ Verlag Berlin, PAJ / MIT Press, ARTMargins, TQW Magazine, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Taipei Performing Arts Center, among others. She also explores ways of accessing experience through experimental formats. Her poetic essays have been published in several issues of manuskripte magazine. She was awarded the 'Literaturförderpreis' of the city of Graz in 2020 and the RotAhorn-Preis in 2021, and was writer-in-residency at the Literarisches Kolloquium in Berlin in 2023.