Elisa R. Linn (Elisa Linn Roguszczak) is an East German writer, exhibition maker, educator, and art historian. She teaches at Bard College Berlin and is completing her PhD under the supervision of Marina Gržinić at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her practice, she is concerned with politics of self-organization, representation, migration, non-essentialist notions of identity, and the minor, challenging modernist conceptions of the state and the 'great man.'  In her research, she examines the impact of “border thinking” and "borders" on marginalized artistic and activist communities and how their strategies of self-organization from below can dismantle necropolitical conditions. In this context, she explores how the Berlin Wall functioned as a “condom” — both during the AIDS pandemic and amid the tensions of the Cold War — and how it influenced the emergence of counter-public spheres. Here, Linn focuses on overlooked oppositional movements at the intersection of art and activism in the GDR and East Germany during the pre- and post-reunification periods, which advocated for alternative, democratic forms of socialism. In this context, she also explores the enduring disparities between East and West following reunification. 

From 2022 to 2025, she was the co-director of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V. and taught at Leuphana University. Since 2012, with architect and curator Lennart Wolff, she has been jointly running the curatorial and artists project km temporaer. She is co-organizing the Film Club der polnischen Versager*innen at the Club der polnischen Versager in Berlin-Mitte. Linn is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Curatorial Program. She has held the interim professorship of the chair of Art Theory and Mediation (Prof. Dr. Kerstin Stakemeier) at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg for the summer semester of 2022. Linn has served as a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the Zurich University of the Arts, and has given guest lectures and workshops at The New School, Barnard College, Columbia University, Pratt Institute in New York City, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Städelschule, TU Berlin, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, among others. Since 2018, Linn has been teaching at the Architectural Association Visiting School Zurich.

Linn has curated exhibitions, performances, and screenings at The Kitchen, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunstverein in Hamburg, and the National Gallery in Prague, among others. Linn co-curated Peter Fend’s first institutional solo exhibition in Italy at Museo Nivola (Sardinia, 2019); solo presentations of Julia Heyward at the Bronx Museum, New York City (2018) and the South London Gallery (2018); as well as KP Brehmer’s first comprehensive U.S. solo exhibition at Maxwell Graham and Petzel Gallery (2023). She regularly contributes to publications and magazines such as Frieze, Starship, artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Mousse, ArtAsiaPacific, BOMB, and Jacobin. 

Mail to: elisa.r.linn@gmail.com; e.linn@berlin.bard.edu