Deborah Zehnder

Deborah Zehnder studied Cultural History and Theory, Political Science, and Modern History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). She has coordinated externally funded research projects at the Department of Cultural History and Theory at HU. As a production director, she has organized several theatre and dance performances and festivals.

In 2010, she assumed responsibility for the Academic Coordination of the Cluster of Excellence »Image Knowledge Gestaltung« funding application; from 2012 to 2018, she took over the Cluster's Academic Management. From January 2015 to August 2016, she was the Academic Manager of the Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Technique, and from 2018 to 2022, she served as the Academic Manager of MoA.

For the second research period of MoA, she resigned from leading the Academic Management of the Cluster to engage herself as the elected Representative for severely disabled members of HU. Simultaneously, she pursued her own research in Symbolic Material. Her doctoral project explores how climate change exacerbates environmental and attitudinal barriers for people with disabilities. It seeks to understand how barriers, in the sense of constraints whose activity as a disability represents a complex interaction, can be reconceptualized as a relational element and form of environing in the context of constantly changing climate impacts.