Profile

Sonya Merutka is a Ph.D. student in Art & Archaeology with a focus on performance, queer theory, critical race and disability studies, and poetics within modern and contemporary art. As a recent Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, they developed a project on language, dysfluency, and crip temporality in performance.

Merutka received their M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, a degree in Photography from Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, and a B.A. in Feminist Philosophy and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dedicated to the study and publishing of queer and trans authors, Merutka is the founder and organizer of Subtext, a community-based forum and reading group for critical queer studies, which started in Berlin in 2015. They also serve as the Performance Reviews Editor at Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.

As a producer for new commissions, performances, and exhibitions, they have worked with artists such as P. Staff, Ed Atkins, Adrian Piper, James Richards, and Jesse Darling at institutions across the United States and Europe including Performa Biennial, New Museum, Tate Britain, Kunsthalle Basel, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Haus der Kunst, Gropius Bau, Hamburger Bahnhof, and Venice Biennale, among others.