ABOUT
Katya Lachowicz is an artist and visual anthropologist, whose practice develops experimental forms of storytelling at the intersection of contemporary art, anthropology, and critical theory. Working across moving image, sound, performance, and ethnographic research, she investigates how political, ecological, and material worlds are continuously assembled, contested, and transformed.
Situated in the liminal space between fiction and reality, her work explores the infrastructures, imaginaries, and material relations that shape processes of emergence, resistance, and collapse. Through a multimodal practice grounded in systems thinking, she examines the entanglements of landscape, value, biopolitics, and ecology, asking how complex social and environmental transformations might be understood beyond linear or binary models of thought.
At the centre of her practice is the development of research methodologies that translate complex theoretical and ethnographic inquiry into affective, sensory, and imaginative encounters. By combining artistic experimentation with anthropological fieldwork, she creates forms of knowledge that move across disciplinary boundaries, opening new ways of perceiving and engaging with uncertain political and ecological futures.
Her doctoral research in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Politics of Matter: Constellations of Landscape, Value and Utopianism in Southern Spain (2026), develops a constellational approach towards questions of progress and collapse through an improvisatory methodology she terms 'moving encounters'. The performative approach extends itself into the ethnography in the form of an ethnographic toolbox that fragments, negotiates, and reconfigures narrative, inviting readers and/or audiences to consider the (de)compositional processes through which political imaginaries are made and unmade.
Email: katya.lachowicz(a)gmail.com
Website: www.katyalachowicz.com
Instagram: @katyasartstudio
Europe’s Past, Present, and Future: Utopias and Dystopias
Rethinking Crisis, Resistance and Strategy
Historical Materialism Conference, Panteion University, Athens, Greece, 2nd-5th May 2019
The Fourth International Conference on Visual Representations of the Other
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2nd-5th December 2015
SIEF2015: Utopias, Realities, Heritages: Ethnographies for the 21st Century,
Contextualizing Changes: Migrations, Shifting Borders and New Identities in Eastern Europe, Dom na Uchenia, Sofia, Bulgaria, 8th - 10th October 2014
UCL, London, UK, 7th December 2018
Cultural Clash Nomade, Espace Duplex, Geneva, Switzerland,
Justizvollzugsanstalt (Prison) Kaßberg, Chemnitz, Germany, 18th - 21st August 2011
Pavilion X, Galerija Jakopič, Ljubljana, Slovenia,
Klang im Namen des Raumes, Im Namen des Raumes, Berlin, Germany,
Blockade I, Universal Cube, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig, Germany,
Resonanzen: Festival für Hörkunst, Tapetenwerk, Leipzig, Germany,
EDUCATION
2021-2026 PhD in Visual Anthropology, Goldsmiths University, UK
2015-2018 MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology, University College London (UCL), UK
2009-2013 Dipl. (MA) in Media Arts, Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig (HGB) Germany
2008-2009 Guest student at Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig (HGB) Germany
2007-2008 BA in Drawing, University of Arts, Camberwell, London, UK
2006-2007 FdA in Fine Arts, University of Arts London, Byam Shaw (CSM), UK
CURATORIAL EXPERIENCE
2013 Member of organisational team for the Cultural Clash Nomade film programme
2012 Member of organisational team for experimental film festival 'Avantgarde ist keine Strömung III', Luru Kino, Leipzig, Germany
2011 Member of team leading a political art workshop and exhibition as part of the festival 'Dialog der Kulturen' in partnership with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Murmansk, Russia
2009 Member of curatorial team IAG for the media art exhibition 'Talk Talk – Interview all Künstlerische Praxis' at the HGB Gallery in Leipzig, which later travelled onto Kunstverein Medienturm in Graz and Galerie 5020 in Salzburg as part of Steirischer Herbst Festival
GRANTS / AWARDS / RESIDENCIES
2025 Wenner-Gren funding for Theatre from the Field
2013 DAAD Student Award
2012 Film funding from the Free State of Saxony Arts Council (KdFS)
2011 Sponsorship from Nubert, Thomann, and In-Akustik for sound installation Economy of Guilt
2009 NGBK / UQBAR residency, Tourist Syndrome: Transient Spaces, Palanga, Lithuania
2005 Second prize in SKOFFKA Festival of Young Cinema, Kinoteka, Warsaw, Poland
With Jim Donaghey – Mutual Aid Versus Volunteerism: Autonomous PPE Production in the Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis, Capital & Class, 46(3), 2022, pp. 427-447
'Nouvelles d'Iran', Agitation Autonome [French], August 2019
'The Cultivation of Image in the Multimedial Landscape of the Polish Film Chronicle' in (eds.) Demski D., Kassabova, A., Kristóf I., Laineste L., Baraniecka-Olszewska K., The Multimedialized Other: The Construction of Reality in East-Central Europe 1945-1980, L'Harmattan, 2017, pp.198-213 https://doi.org/10.56037/978-2-343-11863-5
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