FABIENNE LIPTAY
Fabienne Liptay is a professor of film studies at the University of Zurich. An essential aspect of her research and writing is the collaboration across theory and practice, which has brought her together with many researchers, artists and curators, including the founding members of The Institute for Performance and Film Expanded.
She studied film, theatre and English literature at the University of Mainz, where she received her PhD in 2002. From 1999 to 2001, she also worked as an editorial assistant for the television magazine Kulturzeit (3sat) on culture and cultural policy. She was a lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (2002-2007) and an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2007-2013). In 2022 she joined the Käte Hamburger Research Centre Dis:connectivity in Processes of Globalisation (global dis:connect) in Munich, directed by Burcu Dogramaci, Chris Balme and Roland Wenzlhuemer, as a research fellow. She is currently directing the research project Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format (2017-2026), for which she was awarded an excellence grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
During her years in Munich, as part of the transdisciplinary graduate programme Aisthesis, she was fortunate to teach with distinguished colleagues from the fields of art history, theatre and performance studies, literature, music, philosophy, visual anthropology and the history of science, giving courses and lectures at the LMU Munich and the University of Eichstätt, and occasionally at the VIU – Venice International University and the HFF Munich. She considers these years of her academic life to be the most formative, since she unlearned disciplinary thinking. During her years in Zurich, she continued this path of collaboration, for example as a member of the Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts, for which she curated events and talks. It was then that Fabienne Liptay and Dorota Sajewska met and began their collaboration on the occasion of a ZKK studio talk with Artur Å»mijewski, from which the book Artur Å»mijewski: Kunst als Alibi (DIAPHANES, 2017), co-edited with Sandra Frimmel and Sylvia Sasse emerged.
Fabienne Liptay has published widely on the theory and aesthetics of the moving image, film exhibition, time-based artistic practice and cinema expanded. She is the co-founder and former co-editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal Film-Konzepte (2006-2013) and a co-editor of the book series Think Art, published by DIAPHANES. Her publications include the monograph Telling Images: Studien zur Bildlichkeit des Films (DIAPHANES, 2016) and the co-edited books Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Brill, 2015, with Burcu Dogramaci) and Taking Measures: Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2023, in collaboration with Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Open Access). Together with Liliana Gómez, documenta professor in Kassel, Fabienne Liptay recently co-edited the book Eco-operations (DIAPHANES, 2024, Open Access), published as an artist's edition with plant fiber works and accompanied by an exhibition, film installation and sound performance by Alexandra Gelis at Espace DIAPHANES Berlin. Together with Giuseppe Di Salvatore (Filmexplorer), she curates the series Enchanting Architecture Expanding Film, exploring contemporary forms of an expanded cinema in the city and the lagoon of Venice, building collaborations, among others, with Bogiaisso video art festival, founded by Niccolò Moronato and Alice Jasmine Crippa, and spazifuturi Venezia, founded by Marie Glassl and Michael Heitz.
Together with Dorota Sajewska she is the founder of The Institute for Performance and Film Expanded.
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