As a mentor, she centres dialogue that helps mentees to articulate their own artistic parameters and working methods, and, in the process, to clarify a framework of presentation contexts for their practices.
Megan Hoetger (1984, Los Angeles, California) is a performance, film, and media historian, a curator, convener, exhibition-maker and pedagogue. Hoetger holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley with specialisations in Critical Theory and Film & Media Studies. Currently, she is Lead Lecturer in Performance Theory and Dramaturgical Practice in the MA Performance Practices Programme at ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem. As part of her redesign of the programme’s curriculum in performance theory, Hoetger has devised “The Political Contours of Performing. Representing Bodies, Circulating Performance, Resisting Infrastructures,” a three-part seminar series mapping the matrixes of imaginaries and material conditions that makers enter into when they enter the field of performance research and performance-making. Also, since 2025, she is Head of Production for the Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam.
Previously, from 2019-2024, Hoetger was a programme curator with the Amsterdam-based art organisation If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution where she worked in long-term collaboration with artists and researchers to develop a range of performance productions spanning print media, radio, installation, digital and physical space. From 2022-2023, Hoetger led the project Performing Colonial Toxicity, a multi-platformed research project by architectural historian Samia Henni co-produced by Framer Framed and If I Can’t Dance, which included the award-winning publication Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara; and, in 2023, she oversaw development and production for the multi award-winning Afro-surrealist short film ZWARTE IBIS by the media collective Black Speaks Backs. Other curatorial and editorial projects with If I Can’t Dance included: Black Revelry, spanning a late-night radio show and experimental “album-book” with poet-scholar Derrais Carter; a two-year durational performance of archiving and online database with visual artist Sands Murray-Wassink and cultural producer Radna Rumping entitled Gift Science Archive; the long-term archive activation How We Behave / An Archive of Radical Practice with Grant Watson and Anik Fournier; and the sweeping art historical survey book and research program When Technology Was Female: A History of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989 with Susanne Altmann.
Alongside her institutional work as a curator, Hoetger has also continued to move in several collaborative performance-based research configurations. As a founding member of Zone Collective (established 2016), she works together with cultural practitioner Kirila Cvetkovska on a variety of projects, including: the 2021 participatory research exhibition Shadow Zones: Experimental Cinema History in Yugoslavia; or, a Cinema and a History Made and Unmade by Maps, which spanned installation, outdoor screening program, and performance-lecture series; the 2022 performative workshop Zoning Play Complex, which was the culmination of work undertaken as part of 2021-2022 Fellowship for Situated Practice at BAK — basis voor actuele kunst; and the 2024 artists’ book Studies in Character, which brings together documentation from the group’s experiments in storytelling since 2020. Elsewhere, as a founding member of Disco Comradeship (established 2019), Hoetger also thinks together with art historian Carlos Kong on the relations between film, urban space, club cultures and political conceptions of comradeship under socialist and post-socialist conditions. From 2021–22 Hoetger and Kong co-lead the workshop Archiving Club Cultures at the House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin resulting in the experimental essay ‘Reassembling East German Nightlife: Scores for Curating from Elusive Archives’ for the 2022 glossary Archives on Show, edited by Beatrice van Bismarck. Also in 2022, Hoetger worked with the HKW to realise the program Active Archives, Performing Social Realities in Archival Contexts for the opening of the institution’s exhibition The Whole Live. Archives & Imaginaries. Following from that programme, she has reflected on the last five years of curatorial work in her new essay, “Active Archives. On Performance Curatorial Research and Historiographic Method,” which is forthcoming in the new Routledge Companion to Performance Art in summer 2025.
Megan Hoetger as a mentor
From her interdisciplinary, collaborative, and curatorial experiences, Hoetger is well-attuned to the incredible possibilities and inherent challenges of thinking expansively across aesthetic forms (visual arts, theatre, dance, creative writing, moving image media, and music) and disciplinary interests (art history, architecture, cultural studies, disability studies, decolonial studies, folklore, gender and women’s studies, geography, theatre and dance studies, and urban studies). As a mentor, she thus centres dialogue that helps mentees to articulate their own artistic parameters and working methods, and, in the process, to clarify a framework of presentation contexts for their practices. With this as the pedagogical ground, she supports a wide range of practitioners interested in performance and performance-based research, film and media technologies, archives and archival methods, collective-making, and the politics of knowledge production and transmission. Past mentees projects have focused on handicraft, labour practice traditions, sonic expression, affect and somatics, and the interface of human, non-human and cyborg bodies.