Elisa R. Linn (Elisa Linn Roguszczak) is an East German exhibition maker, art historian, and theorist. 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 the politics of self-organization, migration, non-essentialist notions of identity, and the minor, challenging modernist and nationalist conceptions of the state and the “great man.” In her doctoral research, she examines the influence of border epistemologies on marginalized (artistic) communities situated at the intersection of queer-feminist and diasporic lived realities. She analyzes how their strategies of self‑organization from below, shaped by border thinking — can articulate liminal positions not merely as alternative artistic forms of life, but as experiments in democratic community.

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 this influenced the emergence of counter-public spheres. Here, Linn focuses on overlooked emancipatory movements in the GDR and East Germany, as well as in other postsocialist societies during the pre- and post-reunification periods, which advocated for alternative, democratic forms of socialism. In this context, she also examines 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), Julia Heyward’s first solo presentation in the UK at the South London Gallery (2018), and a solo presentation at the Bronx Museum, New York City (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