Elisa R. Linn (Elisa Linn Roguszczak) is an art historian, exhibition maker, writer, and theorist. Her curatorial, theoretical and writing practice engages with questions of counter-public spheres, 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.” She teaches at Bard College Berlin, where she initiated and leads the college's first curatorial course program, Spaces of Appearances: Exhibitions as Counter-Public Spheres. She is completing her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under the supervision of Marina Gržinić, exploring counter-public practices and migratory aesthetics at the intersections of queer-feminist and diasporic lived realities in the GDR, and tracing their contested afterlives through experiments in democratic community, alternative forms of belonging, and the political imaginaries of post-Wende generations.

From 2022 to 2025, she was co-director of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V. and taught at Leuphana University. At Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, she curated, among others, the first institutional retrospectives of Jürgen Baldiga, Terre Thaemlitz, and Sophie Reinhold’s in Europe, and the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany of the artist duo Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter. 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 taught, given lectures and workshops at New York University (NYU), 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 art institutions, independent art spaces, and galleries, including Kunsthalle Charlottenborg (2026), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2025), Simian (2023), and the National Gallery in Prague (2018). Linn co-curated the exhibition Omnipresence at The Kitchen, New York (2018), in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, and co-edited the accompanying publication of the same title, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art. She 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 South London Gallery (2018), which subsequently traveled to the Bronx Museum in New York City (2018); and KP Brehmer’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in the United States 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, e-flux, and Jacobin. Since 2012, she has jointly run the curatorial and artists’ project km temporaer with Lennart Wolff and, since 2021, has also co-organized the Film Club der polnischen Versager*innen in Berlin-Mitte.

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