12 December 2018

Julia Gerlach
New Secretary of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste

The present head of the Music division of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD, Julia Gerlach, will be the new Secretary of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste, starting from 1st January 2019.

A curator and producer of contemporary music and sound art, Julia Gerlach studied musicology in Berlin and Paris (with Prof. Dr. Helga de la Motte, and others). Until 2009, she freelanced in Berlin (Berliner Gesellschaft für neue Musik, KlangQuadrat. Büro für Klang- und Medienkunst, management of the Maulwerker), and was a scholarship holder of the Mariann Steegmann Foundation, with a research focus on body, music, and gender. From 2009 to 2012, she was project coordinator and curator at the ZKM I Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe (coordinator of the project "Amazonas – Musiktheater in drei Teilen", curator of the urban sound theatre Maritime Rites by Alvin Curran, and jointly with Peter Weibel, of the extensive exhibition "Sound Art. Klang als Medium der Kunst", amongst others). Consequently, she headed the Music division of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD from 2012 to 2018 (initiator and artistic head of mikromusik. Festival experimenteller Musik und Sound Art, and initiator and co-producer of the German-Brazilian concert and exhibition project Re-inventing Smetak, jointly with the Ensemble Modern, amongst others).

Julia Gerlach is an author and editor of catalogues, CDs, and professional articles, and is a member of the advisory committee of the Beethoven Jubiläums Gesellschaft mbH and the Stiftung Brandenburger Tor.

The Music Section is one of six arts sections of the Akademie, which can look back on a series of renowned members, such as Richard Wagner, Ferruccio Busoni, Arnold Schönberg, and Igor Strawinsky, since its foundation in the first half of the 19th century. The current programme work under the leadership of the two Directors Manos Tsangaris and Samir Odeh-Tamimi endeavours to respond to contemporary artistic and social questions. It is mostly thematically formulated, and oriented towards compositional manuscripts or aspects, while frequently taking up interdisciplinary perspectives in recent years.