Daniela Agostinho

On leave at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Sept. 2024-January 2025

Daniela Agostinho (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University. Her main areas of research and teaching are visual and digital culture, collaborative artistic research, critical data practices, and feminist and post/decolonial studies. 

Her current work is concerned with ethics of digital archiving and curating digital images; reparative approaches to colonial archives; care and display of contested heritage; and artistic/practice-based responses to war and imperial histories.

In the Fall 2024, she will be a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Amsterdam.

She is co-coordinator of the project "Reparative Encounters: a transcontinental network for artistic research and reparative practices", with visual artists La Vaughn Belle, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Bernard Akoi-Jackson and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld. The project brings together artists, researchers and cultural agents from US Virgin Islands, Ghana, Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark to share artistic interventions into colonial structures across locations differently impacted by Danish colonialism. The project is funded by the Nordic Culture Fund (2023-2024).

At Aarhus University, she co-directs the research unit "Postcolonial Entanglements" with Diana González Martin and Ushma Chauhan Jacobsen. She is also co-director of the Center for Critical Data Practices with Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, Jussi Parikka, Pablo Velasco and Midas Nouwens.

She is a member of the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, the Cultural Transformations programme, and the Arts, Aesthetics and Communities research programme.

She is currently working on a book entitled Archival Encounters: Care, Curation and Colonial Archives. The book emerges from her research project Archival Encounters, funded by a postdoctoral fellowshop from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. 

She is co-editor of several books: (W)Archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (with Solveig Gade, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup and Kristin Veel), a collection of essays by theorists, artists and curators on digital archiving and contemporary warfare, published by Sternberg Press/MIT Press, 2021; Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data(with Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Catherine D’Ignazio, Annie Ring and Kristin Veel), an interdisciplinary glossary of terms relevant to critical studies of big data, published by MIT Press, 2021; The Uncertain Image (with Ulrik Ekman, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup and Kristin Veel), a collection of essays by scholars and artists on the relation between images and datafication, published by Routledge, 2019; and Panic and Mourning: The Cultural Work of Trauma (with Elisa Antz and Cátia Ferreira), published by Walter de Gruyter, 2012. 

She is also an independent curator, and recent exhibitions and programmes include For Alberta and Victor, a collection of conjurings and opacities, a solo show by visual artist La Vaughn Belle at ARIEL Feminisms in the Aesthetics (Copenhagen, 2021); Fleshing Out the Image, an exhibition by Igor Jesus and public programme (Porto, 2020); 13 Shots, a solo show by Aimée Zito Lema at Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, 2018), and Artists Film International a group show at MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon, 2017). 

She is a member of the European project 4CS - From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, funded by the Culture programme of the European Union. 

Before joining Aarhus University, Daniela was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen (2016-2021), first as a researcher within the collective project Uncertain Archives, funded by the Danish Research Council, and subsequently leading the postdoctoral project Archival Encounters, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. She remains affiliated with the Uncertain Archives research collective and continues to grow the Archival Encounters project. Before moving to Denmark, she was a Lecturer at the Catholic University of Portugal, in the MA and PhD program in Culture Studies (2014-2016), where she coordinated the Lisbon Consortium network. She holds a PhD in Culture Studies from the Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon (2014).