Michelle Teran
To Sleep Together in Comfort (Which is Politics)
Workshop, 2021
Marc Herbst and Michelle Teran
Michelle Teran (born in Canada) is an educator, artist, and researcher. She is practice-oriented Research Professor Social Practices at the Research Centre Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA).
Her current and ongoing research areas are: socially engaged art, counter-cartographies, social movements, transmedia storytelling, feminist, eco-social and critical pedagogy. Her multidisciplinary works span film, text, bookworks, performance, installation, public readings, online works, participatory events, pedagogic experimentation, and interventions in public space.
She received her philosophiae doctor (Ph.D.) in Artistic Research, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. Her research project Future Guides for Cities: From Information to Home looked at the relation between online archives and the domain of the city, examining the notion of a guide, as a person, map, and method. This research built on her award winning work Life: A User’s Manual and and Buscando al Señor Goodbar and was an inquiry into the narrative language within the overlapping of different types of mapping systems: online tracking using geo-locational data, situated storytelling, and contemporary archiving practices. During this period, she joined Microhistories, a research group based in Berlin, Skopje, Gothenburg and Stockholm, with a shared interest on the use of microhistories, or stories of the everyday told by everyday people, as a form of history writing and an artistic genre. The research gathered knowledge from artistic practice/artistic research and the field of history. One of her contributions to the research was her work Folgen, a lecture performance and city novel that drew on existing narratives of video makers found YouTube to build a multi-layered media landscape of Berlin.