Carmen Lael Hines is an independent writer, researcher, and curator working across contemporary art, visual culture, and critical theory. She collaborates with public institutions, galleries, universities, and cultural platforms to develop exhibitions, research projects, and educational programmes. Her work engages with theories of labour, new media, logistics, and interspecies relations, examining the political, aesthetic, and material conditions through which digital cultures and contemporary forms of work are produced and sustained.

She is currently Programme Leader of the BA (Hons) Creative Media Arts at IED Madrid and a research and curatorial consultant for Organising Against Invisibility: Logistics, Labour, Art and Cross-Border Counterpublics, a project funded by the Swedish Research Council and currently hosted as working group at MediaLab, Matadero. From 2019 to 2024, she was a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Visual Culture at TU Wien, where she contributed to the FWF-funded research projects Data Publics: Public Plurality in an Era of Data Determinacy (2019–2021) and PlatFORMed City (2022–2024). She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with a dissertation entitled The Care Complex: Staging Digital Lifestyles.

Carmen has held teaching and visiting professorships at institutions including Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, HEAD – Genève, the Institute of Contemporary Art at TU Graz, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and the Department of Spatial Design at TU Wien.

Her curatorial practice encompasses exhibitions, public programmes, and research initiatives developed with institutions and platforms including Klima Biennale Wien, The Ryder Projects, the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Wiener Festwochen (2025), Never at Home Vienna, The Institute for Postnatural Studies, Sala de Arte Joven in Madrid, and Exhibit Galerie at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is also the co-editor of Plant Space: Territories, Architectures and Technologies (Sternberg Press) and Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy (Bloomsbury). Together with Morgane Billuart, she co-hosts GIRL EMPLOYEE, a podcast exploring platform capitalism, gender, and visual culture.

Carmen holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall, and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

CV Portfolio available upon request

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Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy

Plant Space: Territories, Architectures and Technologies of the Vegetal