OPEN CALL:Live Art Forms performative practices master’s program, Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg

Live Art Forms performative practices master’s program is accepting applications for its fifth academic year, which begins in October 2026.

As a newly developed program, Live Art Forms seeks to foster a contemporary understanding of performance art, not simply as a practice between visual and performing arts, but as an “undiscipline”—an array of performative and aesthetic practices that take place in a variety of public spaces, on digital platforms, and via networked infrastructures, and that are rooted in and emerge from both social and physical bodies.

The program enables students to work towards complex individual, collaborative, or collective performative practices in the context of artistic research and experimentation. We aim to nurture and support a diversity of worldviews and identities, even in the face of the challenges posed by the current political climate.

Key areas in daily study and teaching—alongside the program’s performative artistic research—focus on situating students’ projects within diverse spaces; guiding their engagement with digital technologies; and fostering the development of scores, choreographies, moving practices, and body-based research.

The program is hosted and directed by Professor JP Raether and Assistant Professor Tamara Antonijević, who teach performative practices and expanded dramaturgy. In the program’s GEOS thread, they provide mentorship through a two-year sequence of classes, including group crits, presentations, showings, and individual consultations. Professor Kerstin Stakemeier offers a series of four theory seminars that broaden students’ knowledge of various themes, texts, and discourses. Lecturers Támas Páll and Catalina Insignares serve as the program’s Technologist and Somaticist, respectively, and lead the TECHNE and the SOMA threads. They mentor students’ projects related to digital performance technologies as well as movement and body-based practices.

A group of international Visiting Artist Lecturers is regularly invited to enhance the curriculum by co-teaching lectures, seminars, and week-long, thematically focused workshops. They are encouraged to engage with students’ work through individual mentoring sessions and to provide feedback during presentation weeks. Over the past two years, artists such as Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Ester Bergsmark, Melanie Bonajo, Alice Chauchat, Stefanie Comilang, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Valentina Desideri, Sher Doruff, Marcelo Evelin, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, Sara Friend, Johanna Hedva, Joey Holder, Jessika Khazrik, Vika Kirchenbauer, Gérald Kurdian, Myriam Lefkowitz, Ghislaine Leung, Viktor Neumann, Omsk Social Club, Simon Speiser, Jenna Sutela, Pilvi Takala, caner teker, Christopher Weickenmeier, Joshua Wicke, and others have participated.

The Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg offers excellent study and research opportunities to approximately 300 students and integrates a wide variety of creative practices within a single institution. For over 350 years, we have been fostering the artistic and creative ambitions of our students and staff. The Academy is located in a modernist, transparent, and light-filled pavilion architecture that seamlessly blends into its surrounding forest—bringing together studios, workshops, and facilities on one campus.

As an international master’s program, Live Art Forms is taught in English. Knowledge of German is not a requirement for the application. The program features a unique structure that allows it to be both an intensely focused campus-based learning environment and, at the same time, to foster mobility of students and faculty across the metropolitan region of Germany and beyond.

Therefore, students are required to be present on campus only during four one-month-long phases in the fall, winter, spring, and summer. These intensive phases alternate with phases of independent study, during which students are free to pursue their projects elsewhere and off-campus, while remaining digitally connected with our faculty.

We especially welcome applications from international students, and, as part of the public university system, we offer the program tuition-free to students from all regions of the world. Please visit our website for more information on the application process and detailed admission requirements or follow @liveartforms for regular updates and events.

We offer an online information session on March 24, 2026, at 2pm (CET) with our core faculty. Register here with your full name and the country you will be joining the session from.

Call for applications 2026 is closing on April 15 at 12pm CET.