Hi, and welcome to my page. You’ve reached Freda Fiala, working as a writer, researcher and curator with a focus on performance-based practices and trans-contemporary ideas. Currently I am a Post-Doc University Assistant in the ERC Project OLFAC (Olfactormativity. Exploring the Intervening Performativity of Smell). My academic journey bridges Theater, Film, and Media and East Asian Studies (Sinology), developed through study periods in Vienna, Berlin, Hong Kong, and Taipei. My P.h.D., funded by a DOC grant from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2020–2023), explored contemporary performance in Taiwan through its networks and cultural-political implications. Titled Contemporary Performance in Taiwan: Curating Communities, Staging Liveness, it is set to be published in 2025 as the first English monograph on contemporary performance and its role in informal cultural diplomacy in the Taiwanese context.

My research is guided by questions of cultural contact and concepts of the canon and the peripheral, in macro- and micro-historical frameworks. I work with methods from performance studies, curatorial and museum studies, mostly centred on the regions of Western Europe and East Asia. My practice attempts to critically incorporate unlearning as an integral mode of learning, probing the influence of cultural infrastructures on modes of the artistic and institutional, and exploring aesthetics in pluridisciplinary dynamics.

I have been a guest lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Vienna and a theory mentor at the P.A.R.T.S. School for Contemporary Dance in Brussels. Besides this academic path, my curatorial work includes developing performance formats for museum spaces, such as The Non-fungible Body? and HYBRID BODIES at the OK Linz, as well as co-curating symposia (Performance Besides Itself. Infra- and Parastructures of a Contemporary Liveness with Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Curatorial Tipping Points with the Austrian Association of Curators, Salzburger Kunstverein and Museum der Moderne Salzburg).

I am a board member of AAC (Austrian Association of Curators) and the Anti-Racism Committee of the Association for Asian Performance. My writing has been published by DISTANZ Verlag Berlin, PAJ / MIT Press, TEXTE ZUR KUNST, ARTMargins, TQW Magazine, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Taipei Performing Arts Center, among others. For my work, I have received the 'Literaturförderpreis' of the city of Graz in 2020 and the RotAhorn-Preis in 2021; and was a writer-in-residency fellow at the Literarisches Kolloquium in Berlin in 2023 and a fellow of Goethe Institute’s EU delegation to Japan in 2024.