Michelle Teran

Michelle Teran (born in Canada) is an educator, artist, and researcher. She is a practice-oriented Research Professor (Lector) in Social Practices at the Research Center WdKA, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands, where she heads the Social Practices research program. Along with the research line transformative pedagogy, the research program works with the Willem de Kooning (WdKA) Social Practices study program, with research on social relations, collaboration, and embodiment. Her current research areas are critical care, regenerative practices, and transformative pedagogy, focusing on the ecologies of care, collective grief, feminist, decolonial, eco-social, and critical pedagogies. She situates her research, teaching, and artistic work within a genealogy of social practice and at the intersection of arts, activism, pedagogy, and community-engaged work.

In 2021, she initiated the interfaculty Promiscuous Care Study Group, who has been researching and writing about caring infrastructures and promiscuous care. This research has culminated in two forthcoming publications: Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care (Journal for Aesthetics & Protest, 2024) and Utterances: Composing a Care-Informed Research Practice (HumdrumPress/Metero Editions, 2024). Previous books include Everything Gardens! Growing from the Ruins of Modernity (ADOCS, 2020) from her involvement in the eco-social learning project The Neighborhood Academy in Berlin and the translation project Mortgaged Lives: From the Housing Bubble to the Right to Housing (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest/Traficantes de Sueños, 2014) from her multi-year research on the Spanish right-to-housing and anti-eviction movement. Formerly, she was Associate Professor at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art / Norwegian University of Science and Technology where she led the Master Fine Art program.

Michelle Teran received her philosophiae doctor (Ph.D.) in Artistic Research, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. She contributes her expertise in artistic research to the PD Kunst & Creatief 3rd cycle studies pilot, where she is a graduate committee member and provides supervision and other guidance to PD candidates. Through workshops, courses, lectures, seminars, and dedicated supervisory roles she accompanies Ph.D., Postdoc, master- and bachelor-level research on a broad spectrum of topics that include radical pedagogies, diversity and inclusion in higher art and design education, food and resistance, politics of housing, critical care, somatic and embodied reading practices, feminist science fiction, collective grief, artistic research methods, autotheory, environmental and narrative ecologies.

An award-winning artist, her multidisciplinary works span film, publications, performances, installations, public readings, participatory events, pedagogy experiments, and interventions in public space. She has presented internationally, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin, Transmediale Festival Berlin, CCCB/MACBA Barcelona, Ars Electronica Linz, and National Museum of Fine Arts Taichung. She is a member of the de Zandweg allotment garden community in Rotterdam South. In her allotment plot turned art and ecology project she grows vegetables, experiments with regenerative agricultural methods, and hosts different exchanges and education activities. She lives and works between Rotterdam and Berlin. (2024)

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