Yvonne Schmid

Yvonne Schmidt is a professor, founder and head of the EcoArtLab and responsible for the research field of art education at the Institute Practices and Theories in the Arts at HKB /BFH. She teaches and researches on arts-based research, transdisciplinarity, performance and disability, art (mediation) and climate change, curating as political practice and the (digital) transformation of cultural institutions, including the research projects «Aesthetics of the Im/Mobile» (2022–2026) and «EcoArtLab. Relational Encounters between the Arts and Climate Research» (2023–2027), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is co-president of the Swiss Association for Theatre Research and founder of the «Performance & Disability» network of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). In this context, she has curated encounters between scholars and artists in Asia, Europe, and South America for a decade. Before she joined HKB, she was a Lecturer and Deputy Head of the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (IPF) at ZHdK, where she initiated and led various research projects and established the international PEERS for emerging artistic researchers as well as a PhD program. After studying theatre and dance studies and literature in Bern, Paris, and Mainz, she received a PhD in Theatre Studies at the University of Bern (2013). She was a research fellow at UIC Chicago and at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Yvonne has worked for different performance festivals, and created formats that foster a dialogue between arts, sciences, and society.