About

Megan Hoetger is an on-the-ground hard femme⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠, and she is also a performance, film, and media historian, a curator, convener, and pedagogical dreamer. Hoetger holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley where she was mostly hanging out with activists, community organisers, and interdisciplinary circles of folks from dance and theatre studies, theatre-making and visual art practice, art history, geography, public health, law, critical theory and ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, comparative literature, computer sciences, architecture and design, urban planning, sociology, anthropology, film, (old) media and new media studies.

Nowadays, Hoetger is based in the Netherlands where she moves between cultural and educational sectors in a range of collaborative and collective constellations. At the core of her work is a double commitment: first, to a research praxis that rejects colonial and (neo)liberal strategies of knowledge production; and second, to the frames of thinking offered by the field of performance studies with regards to time, (im)material transmission, and embodied memory. Hoetger is particularly attentive to what these frames of thinking can teach her about historiographic method, the relationality of archival work / the relational work of ‘the archival,’ and the politics of remembering events – from macro-level actions in statecraft and international relations to micro-level happenings like a film screening, poetry reading, or performance.

Her research praxis traces and engages with historical and contemporary entanglements of cultural production, technologies of distribution and display, the labor of organising, and forms of gathering. Exhibitionary forms, festival structures and funding policies figure in rather largely, as do localised strategies of making and everyday domestic relations. Hoetger’s gestures of tracing and engaging often look like an interest in artistic practices per se, but sometimes not. It depends on who is doing the looking, from where, and at what moment they might happen to cast their gaze.

download curriculum vitae:
mhoetger-cv-fall-winter-2024.pdf