From 2020 to 2024 Barbara Clausen was Vice Dean for Research and Creation at the Faculty of Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada, where she has been a professor of contemporary art and performance in the art history department since 2011. Over the last two decades, Clausen (PhD 2010 University of Vienna) has lectured and written extensively on the historiography and institutionalization of performance-based art practices and the discourses surrounding the politics of the body, the exhibition, and the archive.

Clausen’s focus and close collaborations with artists are informed by her formative years at Dia Art Foundation (1996-2000), CTP De Appel in Amsterdam (2000-2001) and documenta11 (2002), as well as the many projects, institutions, and artists she worked with thereafter. Since 2000 she has curated numerous exhibitions and performance series in Europe as well as North America, including After the Act (2005), Again and Against (2006) and Push and Pull I & 2 (2010-2011) which she developed with mumok (Museum of Modern Art Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Tanzquartier Vienna and Tate Modern, London. After moving to Montreal, Canada, in 2011, she curated the first retrospective of Babette Mangolte at VOX centre de l’image contemporaine in 2013, followed by Stage Set Stage. On Identity and Institutionalism (SBC Gallery, 2014) and in 2016 Joan Jonas: From Away and Affinities, both at the PHI Foundation, featuring the work of Rosa Barba, Simone Forti, Andrea Geyer, Joan Jonas, Jason Moran, Tanya Lukin Linklater, taisha paggett, and Lawrence Weiner.

Some of these projects were closely interwoven with her academic research and dedicated to archival and curatorial forms of community building, notably An Annotated Bibliography in Real Time: Performance Art in Quebec and Canada (Artexte Montreal, 2014-2019). From 2017-2021 she was the Curatorial Research Director of The Joan Jonas Knowledge Base (JJKB), an open access digital archive she developed with the Artist Archives Initiative at New York University, collaborating with more than a dozen artists and curators in major museums in Europe, North America, and Asia. Most recently, she is the author of Babette Mangolte. Performance zwischen Aktion und Betrachtung (Edition Metzel, Munich) and co-editor of the monograph Joan Jonas: next move in a mirror world (Dia Art Foundation & DAI New York) both published in 2023.