Univ.-Lekt. Dr. phil. Christina Natlacen
Christina Natlacen is an art and media theorist with a special emphasis on photography and film. Her working method is oriented towards Cultural Studies and is based on visual material from art, popular culture and science. Longstanding research focuses on the history, theory and aesthetics of photography. In recent years – supported by an inspiring collaboration with colleagues from Romance Studies and German Studies – film has become another center of interest. In terms of content, she is currently concerned with, among other things, visual forms of self-presentation in different contexts as well as with conceptions of nature in the age of the Anthropocene.
After having studied art history at the University of Vienna, she received her PhD with a DOC-scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2006 at the University of Graz with a thesis on Arnulf Rainer’s photographic self-stagings. A temporary position in the photo department of the Albertina in Vienna followed, before she became a fellow of the Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fund in the photo collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
In addition to teaching positions at the universities of Vienna and Graz, she worked at the University of Siegen as a research assistant with Prof. Dr. Susanne Regener at the Chair for Media History and Visual Culture. From 2013 to 2019 she held a junior professorship for Media Studies and Cultural Studies at the Institute for Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.
Christina Natlacen is currently working as a lecturer, author and critic in Vienna. She is completing a monograph on a visual media history of the individual in public space, based on photographic and cinematic source material from the period 1880 to 1930.