Inke Arns, a curator who holds a PhD, has been the artistic director since 2005 and the director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany, since 2017 (www.hmkv.de ). She has worked internationally as a curator, writer, and independent theorist specializing in media art, internet cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. She lived in Paris (1982–86), where she finished high school, in West Berlin in 1988, where she studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988–96), and in 2004 received her PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin, with a thesis focusing on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected historical advancement, the avant-garde, and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in (former) Yugoslavia and Russia. Since 2021, Inke Arns has held the position of Visiting Professor at the Academy of Arts in Münster, Germany. She has taught at universities and art academies in Berlin, Leipzig, Zurich, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam (2000-2017), and has lectured and published internationally. Her books include Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) – eine Analyse ihrer künstlerische Strategien im Kontext der 1980er Jahre in Jugoslavien (Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie, 2002), Netzkulturen (Europäische Verlagsanstalt), they may seem mysterious! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2004).