Jury

Barbara Behrendt is a freelance cultural journalist and theater critic for Deutschlandradio, rbb, taz, and Die deutsche Bühne. She teaches cultural journalism at the Burda School of Journalism. As a recipient of the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship, she reported from New York and Montreal and was a member of various juries: Mülheimer Theatertage, Berliner Kindertheaterpreis, Berliner Autorentheatertage, Theaterpreis des Bundes, Heidelberger Stückemarkt. She has managed and chief edited blogs for the Federal Cultural Foundation, Theatertreffen, and Mülheimer Theatertage.

Mathias Hinke was born in Mexico City in 1973. He studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, Art-History and Musicology at Humboldt Universität in Berlin and Physics at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has an arts-teaching diploma from Cambridge University. He is married and has four children. 

2015-2016 he held a guest-professorship in the composition department and since the fall of 2016 assisting-professor at the Institute for Experimental Music, UdK Berlin. He has held keynotes on experimental composition at the National Junior College Singapore, Northwestern University, Duke University, the happy new ears-congress Mannheim, Neue klänge Rendsburg and is frequent guest-juror at the Sibelius Academy. Since 2016 he has collaborated with the director Carlos Manuel and with artist Pedro Lasch producing public access works. Hinke has written pieces for the Opera de Bellas Artes Mexiko, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Düsseldorfer Symphony Orchestra, Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra, Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México, Sonar Quartett, KNM Ensemble, NTM Mannheim, MAS Sextett among others. He has been invited to festivals such as Märzmusik Berlin, Gaudeamus Music Festival Netherlands, Kallio new music days Helsinki, Forum Neue Musik Köln.

Dr. Ilgaz Gurur Ertem works internationally as a researcher, lecturer, and curator. Her transdisciplinary research, which crosses the fields of social sciences and dance and performance studies, focuses on the bodily and aesthetic enunciations of the political.

Ertem was a Humanities Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and a Fellow of the Hannah Arendt Seminar at The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School. Recently, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Free University. Ertem has served as a jury member for the German Dance Platform 2020 and curated the iDANS Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance in Istanbul between 2006 and 2014. She is the artistic director of Bimeras Berlin gGmbH, a not-for-profit initiative inquiry across the arts, social sciences, and humanities. Her recent publications include: “Care for the Earth, Love of the World: Thinking with Hannah Arendt on Somatic Movement/Dance” ( ed. Mariella Greil, De Gruyter, 2024); “Covid-19 Protests and the Performative Force of Untruth: Some Arendtian Intimations” (Performance Research Journal, 2022);  “The Object of My Inquiry” (Curating Dramaturgies, eds. Peter Eckersall and Bertie Friedman, Routledge, 2021); Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Movement, (edited with Sandra Noeth, Passagen, 2018).

Ertem offers seminars at Boğaziçi University's Department of Sociology. She is also an internationally registered somatic movement and dance educator.

Michael Fürst, born in Göttingen in 1975, has been Director of the Film Museum Potsdam since 2023. He studied art and German literature at the Georg August University in Göttingen and the Braunschweig University of Art to become a secondary school teacher.
In Braunschweig, he completed his doctorate in 2015 in the Department of Media Studies on a film and image studies topic about media-reflective horror films. He began his professional career as a research assistant in the Media Studies programme at the Braunschweig University of Art and subsequently at the Braunschweig Centre for Gender Studies.

He developed his interest in museum work at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, where he worked as a curator, temporarily volunteered as a member of the board and also completed his scientific museum traineeship there. This was followed by further exhibition projects, including in collaboration with filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. In 2017, he became a research assistant for programme development at the German Federal Cultural Foundation in Halle an der Saale, where he developed the ‘Kultur Digital’ funding programme together with a colleague.
In 2018, he moved to Göttingen to work as curator on the realisation of the Forum Wissen, a new university museum that critically examines the emergence of academic knowledge.
In 2019, he was a member of the selection jury for the Queer Scope - Short Film Funding of the Association of Independent Queer Film Festivals in Germany and in 2022 a participant in the museum academy museion21 of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation.

Dr Sonja Longolius, born in Gießen in 1978, grew up in Hamburg, has been co-director of the Literaturhaus Berlin with Janika Gelinek since 2018. She studied American Studies and Art History in Hamburg and at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2015, she wrote her dissertation on Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle and Jonathan Safran Foer. She learnt her trade as an exhibition organiser at the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin, among others, and curated various exhibitions, e.g. on video art. In 2016, she co-founded medienkunst e.V.

Sarah Johanna Theurer is a curator and writer focusing on time-based art practices and techno-social entanglements. At Haus der Kunst in Munich, she works to re-cast the exhibition as a responsive medium, working with artists such as Pan Daijing, Isabelle Lewis, Carsten Nicolai, Jenna Sutela, and WangShui. Her survey exhibitions are dedicated to trailblazing artists like Shu Lea Cheang (2025), Katalin Ladik (2023, with Hendrik Folkerts), and Fujiko Nakaya (2022, with Andrea Lissoni), for which she edited the first comprehensive catalogue. She further initiated Echoes, a live program tuning in to the sensuous dimensions of emerging technologies. Previously, she was the director of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler gallery, part of the team of the 9th Berlin Biennale, as well as transmediale Berlin. As a dramaturge she collaborated with performance groups including OMSK Social Club and The Agency. She hosted a show on the Berlin community radio Cashmere and regularly writes for catalogues and magazines.