Lecture Series: 20 Years Valeska Gert Guest Professorship
Valeska Gert and her Afterlives
4/21/2026, 4:15 – 5:45 PM

Political dissident, cabaret performer, movie star, club owner, provocateur, a Jewish refugee in exile, experimental performance artist, and late-in-life tv actress: Valeska Gert survived two world wars and thrived on two continents as an artist who could not be categorized. A true renegade, Gert produced a body of work that transgressed every border and boundary of the performing and time-based arts and irreverently interpenetrated the so-called “low” and “high” artworlds.

This lecture series, curated by Lindsey Drury and Lucia Ruprecht, takes the 20th anniversary of the Valeska Gert Guest Professorship as occasion to celebrate Gert’s contributions to dance, film, performance art, experimental theatre, sound art, Dadaism, queer and feminist cultures, and activism.

A line-up of Critical Dance Studies faculty and international guest speakers discuss Gert’s significance in the context of Weimar dance, her position during the years of National Socialism, her autobiographical writings, and her anti-authoritarian, queer-feminist work in the arts.

The series further connects the university research community with the holdings on Gert in the archive of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste; explores contemporary approaches to Gert’s work by artists such as Jule Flierl and Eszter Salamon; and assesses the impact that Gert has had on historiographical and theoretical commitments in dance scholarship. Together, the lectures will present a state-of-the-art picture of research on one of the most fascinating figures of twentieth-century dance modernism.