A total of 15 research projects were submitted in 2025 – once again from many departments and institutes within the university, such as Fine Arts and Design, Music Education, Open Arts, the Thomas Bernhard Institute and Early Music. The external jury, consisting of Dame Janet Ritterman and Prof. Michael Worton, reviewed the applications for the seventh time. Both had been awarded honorary doctorates just three days earlier at the AEC Congress.
Since 2021, an important part of the process has been feedback from Critical Friends – internal experts who contribute their specialist perspective before the final assessment.
The 2025 award winners
Vice-Rector Dr Mario Kostal presented the certificates to:
- Prize: Elina Saalfeld
Re-enacting the Archive: Art Brut, Sanism and Mad Storytelling
The PhD candidate at the Institute for Open Arts was honoured ‘for her ambitious and highly original proposal to challenge, reconfigure and create artworks out of the works in and, crucially, the archiving of the Prinzhorn Collection through a radically interdisciplinary artistic research project, where critical theory, psychiatric history, Mad Studies, sociology and creativity are brought together to create new paradigms of art, its making and its reception.’
- Prize: Johanna Posch
Premature birth and the effects of neurological music therapy on oral motor skills in children with cerebral palsy (2 applications)
The Master's student (IGP Flute) received the prize ‘for her tireless and imaginative commitment to supplementing the standard care of vulnerable infants with music therapy in both the short and long term’.
- Prize: Francesco Pizzocchero
Redundant Cartographies – wandering beyond the regime of clarity
The PhD candidate at the Institute for Open Arts has been honoured "for his sophisticated proposal to anatomize aesthetic capitalism and to explore how, through the use of 'aesthetic devices', governance and, indeed, all modes and regimes of power can be exposed and questioned and how alternative ways of sensing, thinking, and acting may be discovered.
- Recognition Award: Anna-Lena Mair
Applications for digital media and learning from the perspective of teachers and learners
The MA student from Innsbruck (LA flute) received the award "for her thoughtful proposal to explore, through a mixed-methods approach, how digitally supported music education is being embedded in lower secondary education in Austria with a particular focus on how the teachers' didactic aims and the learners' experiences converge or diverge."
The RCM awards ceremony once again highlights the vibrant and diverse research landscape at the Mozarteum University.
