PhD in the Arts
Overview
The doctoral programme invites students to engage in academic discourse on the further development of the practice of artistic research as well as contribute to shaping the theory of both artistic research and the advancement and appreciation of the arts. Students can expect a diversity of methods, contextualisation and knowledge acquisition. The PhD in the Arts is inter- and transdisciplinary.
Course
The artistic doctoral programme at the Mozarteum University sees itself as an international course of study and offers artists and researchers from various fields such as music, visual arts, theatre, dance, film, media and design an opportunity to further develop independent artistic research practice. The doctoral programme focuses on the potential of artistic processes to articulate themselves as research, highlighting their capacity for creative and critical reflection. In this context, artistic practice serves as both the subject of investigation and the primary method through which research is conducted.
The PhD in the Arts provides a structured framework for the development of individual projects, encompassing a wide spectrum of formats including one-to-one tuition, seminars, workshops, lectures, excursions and a student-led “open space”. The programme is set within a collaborative research environment that fosters artistic and scholarly exchange and collaboration. It is supported by extensive infrastructure including specialised spaces, equipment, instruments and library resources.
The programme is designed for a minimum of 3 years and conducted in English. All courses take place in monthly gatherings. Residence in Austria is not required, but participants are requested to take part in activities in Salzburg.
The programme works with the concept of transversality as an operative principle that opposes both a vertical and a horizontal understanding of art. Examples of transversal practices that the programme welcomes include but are not limited to:
- Practices that engage post-anthropocentric modes of creativity (e.g., reflections on human and other-than-human interaction, environmental awareness, historical and new materialisms, speculative realism, post-human discourses, etc.).
- Practices that develop divergent and creative approaches to history and cultural heritage (e.g., archival practices, reflections of temporal linearity and anachronism, experimental modes of music performance, montages of found footage etc.).
- Practices that challenge hierarchical social and political structures (e.g., centered on feminist, queer, Marxist, decolonial and postcolonial discourses, etc.), as well as traditional divisions of labor in the art market (composer/performer/improviser, artist/spectator, art/society, etc.).
- Practices that engage with the imaginary and spiritual not as marginal nonrealities, but as means to change epistemologies and to reinvent ontologies.
Applications outside this thematic focus are also encouraged.
General course information
With the artistic doctorate, the Mozarteum University extends and completes its rich offer of research in the context of a university of the arts.
The concept of the work, the artistic-research process and their documentation are regarded here as broad, interrelated and divergent categories whose definition and differentiation can themselves become the subject of artistic research.
The programme is aimed equally at graduates of the Mozarteum University Salzburg and at graduates who hold a relevant degree from a recognised domestic or foreign post-secondary educational institution.
In order to be admitted to the artistic doctoral programme, doctoral candidates should fulfil the following general requirements in addition to the formal requirements:
- an artistic profile with ongoing participation in a wide range of cultural activities
- a strong awareness of the context of their own practice and a keen interest in critically engaging with it;
- an interest in critical and creative exchange with colleagues and with a research environment, and openness to the reciprocal change that occurs in such dialogue;
- a willingness to engage with current discursive practices and to contribute to them by developing one's own discourse in artistic research.
Applicants are admitted to the doctoral programme in a two-stage selection process (application and presentation). In addition, knowledge of English (oral and written) must be proven.
General eligibility doctoral programme is proven by the successful completion of a relevant diploma, master's programme or other equivalent programme with at least the same level of education at a recognised domestic or foreign post-secondary educational institution. All degrees in the studies offered at the Mozarteum are considered suitable prerequisites, although applications from graduates of other institutions are welcomed.
In addition to fulfilling the general eligibility criteria, applicants must also pass an entrance examination in order to be admitted to the degree programme. All relevant documents pertaining to the applicant's previous studies must be uploaded to be checked in the course of the online aplication process. Selected applicants will only be invited after all the required documents have been uploaded, and these approved by the university admissions officers.
Documents required for the online application
- The application portfolio (in a PDF file of maximum 5 MB) consists of a written part in English outlining the research project and documenting previous artistic practice, including:
- a curriculum vitae
- a portfolio of relevant activities (exhibitions, concerts, compositions, publications, conferences, etc.), with links to audio and video files and large images where relevant,
- a written proposal for the artistic research project to be developed in the course of the study (contextualisation of the proposed research, research questions, methods and a provisional timetable for the project, optional: proposals for possible supervisors).
The PhD project proposal should consist of 5 to 10 A4 pages.
- MA certificate or diploma obtained from a relevant degree programme, if the degree programme has already been completed.
- Current confirmation of enrolment, if the degree programme has not yet been completed (the certificate must be submitted by the time of enrolment!)
- overview of subjects and grades (Transcript of Records) of the MA programme
- If further previous studies have been undertaken, a complete overview of subjects and grades (Transcript of Records) of all studies must also be uploaded.
- Proof of English language skills, at least B2 Common European Framework of Reference CEFR 2001 (optional for the online application but obligatory for admission).
Form of the documents
- The documents can be uploaded as PDF in the application form.
- If the required documents are not available in German or English, an official translation must be submitted.
Dates & timeline
- Online registration for an audition during the application period (1st February - 28th March 2025) via the application portal Muvac
(PLEASE NOTE: Registration is only possible after submission of all required documents!) - The result of the first part of the selection procedure will be communicated to the applicants until Mid-May 2025.
- Selected candidates will be invited to participate in the second part of the selection procedure in Salzburg between 10th and 12th June 2025.
- The results of the selection procedure will be communicated by the end of June 2025.
- Enrolment during the general admission period.
Accessibility and widening participation
Please note that the Mozarteum University Salzburg offers various support options at the time of your audition and during your studies if you have a disability or a chronic illness.
If this applies to you and you would like to take advantage of counselling, please contact Claudia Haitzmann: claudia.haitzmann@moz.ac.at or +43 676 88122 337.
2. Once in the MOZonline account: fill in the mandatory statistics UHstat1 (pre-registration for studies) and make a note of the application number that is sent by email upon submission of this information.
3. Create an application account in Muvac
4. Fill out your own profile in Muvac (minimum requirements: personal data, information on expertise matching the desired degree programme, in the CV: current employment and information on previous training)
6. Fill out the application form in Muvac ("Apply now"), being sure to enter your application number (see step 2) or Austrian matriculation number in the appropriate field
Please take a look at the FAQs about registration in Muvac if you get stuck at any of the steps.
All courses take place in monthly meetings. Residence in Austria is not required, but participants are asked to participate in the activities in Salzburg.
The final assessment in the artistic doctoral programme consists of the following parts:
- Positive completion of the courses and examinations required by the curriculum, including Interim Review
- Submission of the documentation of the PhD project
- Final Review with a panel of examiners
A course fee (if applicable) and the ÖH contribution (Students' Union fees) must be paid per semester for participation in the course.
Information on the current fees can be found HERE.
No salary or scholarship from the Mozarteum University is associated with admission to the PhD in the Arts programme.
Any questions?
You can find more information about starting your studies here:
PhD Candidates
Drawing on agential realism and posthuman knowledge, my research builds a cartography of the implicit axioms and normative-perceptual structures embedded within aesthetic capitalism. As legal governance increasingly yields to AI infrastructures and market dynamics, regulation no longer operates primarily through law or democratic processes. Instead, it unfolds through algorithms, economic self-regulation, and affective economies, transforming perception itself into a site of governance—modulated by circulation, visibility, and emotional resonance.
My focus lies on the aesthetic and perceptible dimensions of these emergent assemblages, attending to how power and normativity are felt, embodied, and materialized—both in physical spaces and dematerialized domains such as institutions, data infrastructures, and entertainment ecosystems. In this context, I position myself as both observer and observed, tracing how such mechanisms inscribe themselves onto my body, thoughts, and emotions—shaping not only my actions and decisions, but my very becoming. Enmeshed in consumerism, I embody the ideal subject of aesthetic capitalism: too sensitive to remain untouched, too immersed to resist.
My practice centers on capturing what I call “patterns trouvés” through molding, casting, and other inscription techniques. Through experimental mapping and trace-oriented processes, I construct a situated cartography of these formations by identifying perceptible residues—cracks where latent structures surface. This cartography is unstable, contingent, and often born of fortuitous encounters. In these cracks, I trace the silence where power has passed—always ready to return and remap the same spot anew.
What forms of cartography are needed to critically engage with the dispersed mechanisms of control? How might these operations be made traceable?
- - -
I am Francesco Pizzocchero, a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Padua, Venice, Milan, and Salzburg. My practice involves a wide range of materials such as wax, iron, wood, ceramic, and plaster, as well as sound and natural elements. I work across various techniques, including sculpture, casting, drawing, coding, performance, and sound installation.
My academic background began with a degree in law, followed by several years of work as a legal professional. However, it soon became clear that I needed to dedicate myself fully to artistic research and practice. I therefore attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where I graduated with honours in Decoration. Since 2024, I have been admitted to the practice-based PhD in the Arts programme at the Institute for Open Arts - Mozarteum University in Salzburg, where I continue to refine my artistic practice and deepen my research.
EXCESS comprises a series of interdisciplinary collaborations and a dissertation text that focuses on the relation between excess and intractability. I do not consider this body of work to be a PhD project that is autonomous from the rest of my artistic practice; EXCESS and my practice are integrated. Rather, the defining contours of this PhD process have been shaped by navigating the meaning of artistic research within an academic institution, wherein the program that I applied for has shifted so drastically that it is unrecognisable from where it began. The rigorous education of this process has been through questioning how artistic practices conform to the legitimisation of this context, and whether this legitimisation allows for the radically undefinable and unknowable things that become art.
- - -
Rebecca Kressley is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
This research aims to explore the potential of sound as a tool within design process, understood as a structured system of values, principles, knowledge, and methodologies. It reconsiders the role of the musician as a possible interlocutor and mediator in interdisciplinary processes that operate beyond the boundaries of musical performance. Positioned between historical memory and contemporary perspectives, the project draws on a range of experiences - from the Venetian coro spezzato to contemporary sound installations - that demonstrate how sound does not merely occupy space, but actively contributes to its intelligibility, its experiential dimension, and its design methodology. From this standpoint, the research seeks to investigate a project culture that recognizes sound and musical knowledge and practice as generative dimensions, capable of opening new operational and imaginative possibilities. The project seeks to create a platform for reflection and experimentation through dialogue, documentation, collaborative practices, and case studies - allowing sound and musical culture to emerge as modes of thought, communication, and critical engagement. It aims to reconsider the role of musicians in the design of auditory spatial concepts, while simultaneously exploring the interrelation between aesthetics and design strategies, between space and sound.
- - -
Valeria Zane is a musician currently pursuing a PhD at the Mozarteum University. She holds degrees in harp from the Conservatories of Venice and Padua, and a specialization at the Norwegian Academy of Music. She earned an MSc in Management from Ca’ Foscari University and ESCP Business School. Co-founder of studio Pase, her work explores music and creative research projects and processes. She collaborates with the Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation, is a board member of the UIA – Università Internazionale dell'Arte, and has worked with institutions such as La Biennale di Venezia, Oslo Opera House, and Opéra National de Paris.
The PhD project explores how generative real-time media can evoke a felt sense of connection between human and non-human entities by staging ecological and temporal transformation as immersive, perceptual experience. It aims to create a performative “media-organism” that reflects the interdependence of living systems and challenges the separation between nature and human subjectivity. Through a series of audiovisual experiments, the research investigates how motion, rhythm, and real-time image-sound processes can generate somatic resonance—a bodily response to temporal and geological forces. The project intertwines generative animation, motion tracking, and code-based image production with fieldwork-based physical movement practices as methods of sensory data collection and embodied reflection. By emphasizing perception beyond language and linear narrative, the work seeks to reconstruct a sense of presence and ecological kinship. It reflects on how audiovisual media can move beyond representation to activate an awareness of vitality and interconnection within a shared biosphere.
- - -
Claudia Rohrmoser is a video artist working at the intersection of visual music, expanded cinema, and media scenography. Her practice explores the fusion of animation, live cinema, and immersive media, often in collaboration with composers and theatrical set designers. Her work includes audiovisual performances, and large-scale video installations for opera, concerts, and contemporary music. Her installations and performances have been showcased internationally at venues such as Stanford University’s CCRMA (Palo Alto, CA), the Eastman School of Music (Rochester, NY), and Teatro Real (Madrid), as well as at major music and arts festivals like MUTEK Festival Tokio, Salzburger Osterfestspiele, Ars Electronica, and Inventionen Festival Berlin. She is the founder of Cinema Vertigo, a platform for artistic research in media spaces. She has been awarded multiple prestigious grants and scholarships in the field of multimedia composition, including the Salzburg State Prize for Media Art, the Bourges Electroacoustic Music Award, and a scholarship-supported Banff Leighton Artist Residency. Claudia studied Computer Animation at FH Salzburg and Experimental Film and Media Arts at UdK Berlin. Currently, she is a Professor of Motion Design and Media Scenography at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI). Born in Austria, Claudia lives and works in Berlin and Bielefeld.
“Artistic Practice as a mode for Secular Ethics of Late Capitalism” is an interdisciplinary project that consist of the exhibition series, a musical and written thesis. The general aim of the proposed project is to research how—by implementing Marxist Critique and Lacanian Psychoanalyses onto the category of contemporary art—the notion of artistic practice could be considered as an emancipatory strategy that might generate new notions of freedom of subjectivity within late capitalist society. The practice that leads to production of the visual outcome of this project; the art-labor, which I’m forced to undertake simultaneously to my unpaid studies; as well as the enjoyment, which comes from the illusion of “freedom” of such a lifestyle—constitute of the case study for my theoretical thesis. What is important, the exhibition series and a musical are related to each other, too: The final installation of this series will become the movie set for the musical written by myself, which will be developed as a movie.
I build space around and inside shelters—which form an architecture of the uprooted—in which I place objects of a symbolic nature. The installation is inhabited by variety of organisms, such as plants, mycelium, or ants, which are captured without their permission. The idea of a shelter constitutes a narrative of the project and carries its impact, as well as it is utilitarian. The exhibition is foldable, can be displayed anywhere in similar form, and doesn’t take much storage space. The process of making the first half of the whole exhibition-set is the subject of my theoretical research, where every different hut becomes a representative of different chapter of the thesis: such as 'labor, beliefs and “nature”, enjoyment, materialism, history / immediacy.' The notion of a secular ethics understood both in the universal and individual context is the defining characteristic of this research.
- - -
Agata Cieślak – visual artist, researcher, author, curator. She works in various techniques and means of expression to try to deconstruct common tactics and strategies of artistic production, at the same simultaneously searching for the limits of agency in contemporary art. She graduated from the Dutch Art Institute (MA Art Praxis) and then studied philosophy at the Graduate School of Social Research in Warsaw (2021). She is the curator and producer of the first edition of the secondaryarchive.org project – Platform of Artists from Central and Eastern Europe. She has collaborated with many institutions in Poland and abroad, including the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan Studio.
Since 2025, she has been a board member of the artists' association in Poland, the Civil Forum for Contemporary Art (OFSW). Despite many doubts, she still believes in the necessity of art today.
This research project will develop an artistic methodology that engages with organisational structures and planning processes within the built environment. The built world can be considered a material record of human affairs, as 'built documents' which are physical manifestations of the policies, economic incentives, displays of power and technologies of their time. Planning processes reflect material, real-world issues that simulateously carry an ideological and representational weight. By turning to fiction, mimicry and conjecture, the aim is to reveal underlying structures within these processes that would otherwise be inaccessible.
A fictional enterprise, 'Public Programme GmbH', will serve as the site through which these forces and processes are accessed. Rather than identifying a pre-existing site and tracing its entanglements, this project uses a fictional framework as the site itself. This is an attempt to distort or invert the notion of site-specificity by moving away from particular site conditions towards an echo or reflection of the underlying issues. Within this invented context, the service phases of the building industry — the 'Leistungsphasen' or 'Plan of Work' — will be used to trace these world-making processes. These standardised guidelines, which are intended to organise outcomes and define the flow of information, will be reimagined as tools for speculative enquiry. The languages of planning will serve as an offbeat script from which to consider the built environment as man-made, not something that simply exists, but as an act of creation. Using artistic methods and processes that mimic or attach to the structured systems in place in the built environment, this research project seeks to models the conditions that shape our physical world.
- - -
Sunette L. Viljoen, (b. South Africa) is a visual artist living and working in Berlin. Her sculptural installations are frequently site-specific and informed by literature and architecture references. She earned her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2012. Viljoen was a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, (2014-2015); a fellowship recipient at Braunschweig University of Art (2012-2013); and at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2020-2021). She has exhibited at Sonsbeek 20→24 in Arnhem, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Goodman Gallery Cape Town, Die Raum, Berlin, and the 13th Dakar Biennale in Senegal.
This study rests on two premises. First, the conditions of contemporary composition are intrinsically post-human. This claim holds both from the “classical” post-human perspective—where digitality, embodied in code, networks and algorithms, challenges anthropocentric notions of subjectivity—and from the earlier media-philosophical stance of McLuhan, Clark and Chalmers, who regarded even inorganic tools such as notebooks or pencils as extensions of the human mind.
The second premise is that the post-human predicament created by these conditions foregrounds memory within the specific artistic practice of contemporary composition. Music still depends on memory and expectation of temporal structures, and post-conceptual composition, in which reflection on mediality is internalised, will continue, perhaps for a long time, to treat memory not as a problem to be dispensed with but as the primary locus where mediality is negotiated. Under post-human circumstances the question of memory is posed in forms such as: What shall we call memory? Who remembers? How is remembering enacted?
Grounded in these premises, this artistic research asks how musical temporal structures—how music exists as form in time—can engage the memory-related questions that arise in contemporary composition. Through the artefacts themselves and an autoethnographic
record of the working process, the project makes visible the tacit, practice-based knowledge it produces, aiming to contribute to both compositional practice and scholarly discourse.
- - -
Noh Seung Ju, born in Seoul, South Korea in 1997, is a composer currently based in Austria. His work has earned the International Stiftung Mozarteum’s Paumgartner Medal, selection for the Lucerne Festival Composer Seminar (leading to a performance in Ensemble Modern’s Happy New Ears series), and second prize at the Bartók World Competition. Among all musical parameters he is especially drawn to rhythm; influenced by 'pungmul-nori', he explores rhythmic textures and contrapuntal interplay. This focus has led him to the broader architecture of temporal form, a subject he is now pursuing in a doctoral artistic-research programme at the Mozarteum.
Re-enacting a Collection: On Art Brut, Sanism, and Mad Storytelling critically examines the persistent marginalization of artists associated with "Art Brut" who are labeled as mentally ill. Despite widespread recognition that art is embedded within societal contexts, works associated with this term are still portrayed as apolitical, isolated, and mystical—an outlook deeply rooted in sanism. The project seeks to challenge these contextualizations by developing counter-narratives grounded in Mad, situated perspectives that reclaim cultural and social memory of (ex-)patients.
Within the scope of the project, I will engage with historical artworks and archival material from the Prinzhorn Collection (established in 1919)—a key foundation for the collection and study of pathologized art in the European context. At the same time, I will critically examine the collection itself. The project employs strategies such as speculative storytelling, re-enactment, and exhibition-making. A central research question guiding the inquiry is: In what ways can engaging with the socio-political dimensions of historical artworks and archival materials enable the construction of (ex-)patient-led narratives that challenge the authority of archival and psychiatric power?
Rather than interpreting the artworks—and “mental illness” more broadly—as expressions of inner worlds detached from reality, they are explored as forms of artistic knowledge shaped by social, political, and institutional conditions. Influences from (ex-)patient movements inform the project’s aesthetic strategies, emphasizing collective storytelling, fragmentation, and deconstruction—proposing a Mad perspective as both critique and method.
- - -
Elina Saalfeld is an artist-researcher. Her interdisciplinary, lens-based practice explores power structures in image and narrative production. After completing her B.F.A. at HFBK Hamburg in 2020 (class of Broomberg & Chanarin), she receivedearned her Master’s degree in Art in Context at the UdK Berlin in 2023. Since 2018, Saalfeld has been a member of the Young Valley Soil artist collective.
Her individual and collaborative works have been exhibited at, among others, M.1 of the Arthur Boskamp Foundation (2024), CCA Berlin (2023), the Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022 and 2018), and the Museum of Photography Berlin (2021).