OPEN CALL: Live Art Forms master’s program at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg

Live Art Forms performative practices master’s program is accepting applications for its fifth academic year, which begins in October 2025.

As a recently developed program, Live Art Forms aims to teach a contemporary understanding of performance art, not as a practice between visual and performing arts, but as an undiscipline—a plurality of performative and aesthetic practices situated in a multiplicity of public spaces, on digital platforms and networked infrastructures, rooted in and spawning from the social and physical body.

The program enables students to grow with us towards complex individual, collaborative, or collective performative practices in the spirit of artistic research and experimentation. We intend to foster and care for a multitude of worldviews and identities, despite the challenges of the current political climate.

Important threads in daily studying and teaching—as well as the program’s performative artistic research—are concerned with situating students’ projects in multiplicity of spaces; mentoring the use of digital technologies, and supporting the development of scores, choreographies, moving practices, as well as body-based research.

The program is hosted and directed by Professor JP Raether and Assistant Professor Tamara Antonijević, who teach performative practices and expanded dramaturgy. In the program’s GEOS thread, mentorship consists of guidance along a two-year sequence of classes that take the form of group crits, presentations and showings, as well as individual consultations. Professor Kerstin Stakemeier offers a series of four theory seminars, expanding students’ knowledge on an array of themes, texts, and discourses. Lecturers Támas Páll and Catalina Insignares teach as the program’s Technologist and Somaticist and chair the TECHNE and the SOMA threads. They mentor student’s projects in relation to digital performance technologies and movement and body-based practices.

A group of international Visiting Artist Lecturers is invited to expand the curriculum and co-teach lectures and seminars, week-long and thematically focused workshops. They are encouraged to engage with students’ work in individual mentoring sessions and provide feedback during presentation weeks. The past two years featured artists such as Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Melanie Bonajo, Viktor Neumann, Alice Chauchat, Stefanie Comilang, Valentina Desideri, Edit Kaldor, Vika Kirchenbauer, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, Sara Friend, Johanna Hedva, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Jessika Khazrik, Myriam Lefkowitz, Ghislaine Leung, Omsk Social Club, Simon Speiser, Miriam Stoney, Jenna Sutela, Pilvi Takala, caner teker, Christopher Weickenmeier and others.

The Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg provides excellent study and research opportunities to around 300 students and brings together a diverse range of creative practices under one roof. We have been nurturing the artistic and creative ambitions of our students and staff for over 350 years. The Academy is situated in a modernist, transparent, and light-filled pavilion architecture that harmoniously blends into its surrounding forest—successfully combining studios, workshops, and facilities on one campus.

As an international master’s program, Live Art Forms is taught in English. Knowledge of German is not a requirement for application. The program features a unique structure that allows it to be both intensely focused on our campus as a concentrated learning environment and at the same time fostering mobility of students and faculty across the metropolitan region of Germany and beyond. Therefore, students’ presence on campus at the academy is only required during four one-month-long phases in the fall, winter, spring, and summer. These intensive phases alternate with phases of independent study, during which students are free to pursue their projects elsewhere and off-campus, while digitally connected to our faculty. We especially welcome applications from international students and as part of the public university system, we offer the program free of tuition for students from all world regions.

Please visit our website for more information on the application process and detailed admission requirements or @liveartforms for regular updates and events. We offer an online information session on March 26, 2025, at 2pm (CET) with our core faculty. Register at liveartforms@adbk-nuernberg.de with your full name and the country from which you will be joining the session.

Call for applications 2025 is closing on April 15 at 12pm CET.