Carmen Lael Hines is a writer, researcher, and curator based in Madrid/Vienna. Her work engages the politics of platforms, technology, and architecture as expanded media. She studies the ways in which culture is produced and manifests itself on physical and digital environments and is interested in radical politics, popular culture and design typologies. Her research engages platform capitalism, gender/sexuality studies and theories of social reproduction which engage topics such as AI-generated pornography, home automation, femtech, sextech, and digital contraception—subjects that frequently inform the exhibitions she curates. She holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, and an M.A. in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, titled The Plant Complex: Staging Digital Lifestyles. From 2020 to 2024, she was a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology, where she taught a range of courses including The Laboratory of Posthumanist Architecture and The Platform is my Boyfriend.

In her capacity as curator, she has co-developed exhibitions at the Klima Biennale Wien, The Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Wiener Festwochen 2025, La Sala de Arte Joven, and Exhibit Galerie (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), among others, and often explores experimental approaches to installation and exhibition design. She guest lectures at CuratorLab, Konstfack, in Stockholm with a course on exploring theories of platforms, labour and curation beyond the exhibition space. She currently holds a curatorial position at The Ryder Projects, Madrid. She is co-editing the book Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy, to be published by Bloomsbury, and Plantspace, to be published by Sternberg Press. She works closely with the Vienna-based urban initiative NEVER AT HOME currently based at Austria’s oldest broadcasting centre, the FUNKHAUS.

She has taught in the Department of Spatial Design (TU Wien), HEAD (Geneva), Institute for Postnatural Studies, the Institute for Contemporary Art (TU Graz), and has presented her research at institutions including the University of Bologna, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, KTH Stockholm, Index Contemporary Art Foundation, and Floating University Berlin.

Together with Roberto Majano, she won the Se Busca Comisario prize at the Sala de Arte Joven with the exhibition Materia Afectiva, which explores the affective impact of machine learning technologies without the use of screens. 

CV Portfolio available upon request

Instagram
hello@carmenlaelhines.com

The Ryder Projects