Carmen Lael Hines is an independent writer, researcher, and curator working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, and critical theory. Her research examines the entanglements of labour, technology, and the body, exploring how political and material conditions shape the production of digital culture and its imaginaries. She collaborates with public institutions, galleries, universities, and cultural platforms to develop exhibitions, research projects, and educational programmes.

From 2019 to 2024, Carmen was researcher and lecturer in the Department of Visual Culture at Vienna University of Technology, 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. She is currently Programme Leader of the BA (Hons) in Creative Media Arts, University of Westminster x IED Madrid and curatorial consultant for Ghost Platform: Organizing Against Invisibility, a project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

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

Instagram
hello@carmenlaelhines.com

Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy

Plant Space: Territories, Architectures and Technologies of the Vegetal