Nadja Rottner, PhD

Nadja Rottner, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters. Dr. Rottner received her initial M.A. degree in Art History from the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria. She also completed a Museum Studies Certificate at the Pedagogical University of the Diocese Graz-Seckau, Austria. Rottner earned an M.A. in Modern Art and Critical Studies and a Ph.D. at Columbia University, New York City. Prior to joining the University of Michigan-Dearborn, she taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, Hunter College, and the New School for Social Research in New York City, as well as at the California College of the Arts in Oakland/San Francisco.

• Ph.D. Columbia University
• M.A. in Modern Art and Critical Studies, Columbia University
• M.A. Karl-Franzens University of Graz; Museum Studies Certificate, Pedagogical University of the Diocese Graz-Seckau

Professor Rottner has published in a number of refereed journals including the Getty Research Journal, Oxford Art Journal, Art Journal, Modern Drama, Sculpture Journal, and Camera Austria. She has published essays on Alejandro Otero, Sigfredo Chacón, Eduardo Costa, Eugenio Espinoza, Marta Minujín, Claes Oldenburg, Ruth Vollmer, and Robert Whitman, among other postwar artists. She has contributed to Artforum International and has written for Detroit-based platforms such as Essay’d, Detroit Art Review, and Infinite Mile in support of the local arts community.

Dr. Rottner co-edited, with Peter Weibel, Ruth Vollmer, 1961–1978: Thinking the Line (Hatje Cantz, 2006) and Gego, 1957–1988: Thinking the Line (Hatje Cantz, 2006), and edited Claes Oldenburg, an October Files volume (The MIT Press, 2012). In 2015 she published Cardiovista: Detroit Street Photography (University of Michigan–Dearborn). Her research monograph Claes Oldenburg's Theater of Vision: Poetry, Sculpture, Film, and Performance Art appeared in Routledge's Research in Art History series in 2024.

Her current book manuscript, based on interviews, examines a group of Venezuelan artists—Eugenio Espinoza, Milton Becerra, Luis Villamizar, Carlos Castillo, and Yeni & Nan—working in the parks, gardens, nature preserves, and construction sites of 1970s Caracas. Deploying lines and grids as markers of identity, locality, and site history, they performed acts—captured in photography and film—that foregrounded the gendered, stratified, and indigenous body as a diagnosis of the lived conditions of extractivist modernity.