Whittlesey Visiting Chair Assistant Professor Cornelia Krafft has brought performance art to AUB where her courses in the Fine Arts and Art History Department parallel her own personal movement “from stage design into staged spaces and performances in nature.”

In her first semester at AUB, teaching Acting and Directing with an emphasis on performance art, Krafft found that her students “did not understand what [she] wanted from them . . . but later [once immersed in the course] they learned much about themselves,” and learned to experience many things over and beyond what they were required to do, she said.

Now, after the completion of the semester with the first performance series “Irritations I/II” on campus, demand for a new course was so great that Krafft is offering in the spring semester two sections of Performance Art in addition to one section of Design in Theater.

 AUB students are very open, she says, willing to try new things. “They like that I ask a lot of questions and do not tell them the answers.” AUB students study harder than her students in Vienna, and in the first semester they showed huge improvement in their skills—building models, sketching, taking photographs, rehearsing, moving, conceptualizing—often things they had not done before.

Krafft is excited about the art department’s current enhancement of the exposure the “studio arts program can give to students concerning contemporary art . . . essential elements in the training of artists for today’s world,” by adding to traditional courses in painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics—courses in conceptual, video, installation, and performance art.

She would like to be able to work with students, as she does in Vienna, over longer period of time—not just in elective courses taken only once. (She points out that her art courses never involve repetition—“that’s what I love about my work.”)

Students need more than additional time for art courses. Krafft finds AUB’s art department desperately in need of space, especially for studios and exhibition rooms, and, the young department, she says, needs to be better known. “There is little transparency at AUB to see what is happening inside the buildings.” That’s why she took her performance art students on campus, so the university community could see what they were doing.

The arts have been Krafft’s life since her early years; at age 16 she spent a scholarship year at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio studying drama and symphony orchestra, playing both piano and violin.

Her baccalaureate completed back in her homeland, Germany, Krafft then studied stage design in Vienna, and in 1997 completed her MA in fine arts at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. For the next two years she continued at the academy in painting for three-dimensional space, and in 2002 joined, as assistant professor, the Department of Stage and Film Design in Vienna’s University of Applied Arts, where since 2004 she has also been lecturer in installation and performance art, and, from 1997, has had in Vienna her own artistic studio for installation, stage, costume, film set, and exhibition design.

Professor Krafft has exhibited, given public performances, created installations, produced museum and stage designs, and lectured widely in Germany, Austria, Italy, Norway, and Australia. Her publications, films, installations, and performances have won scholarships and competitions in Italy, Australia, and Austria.

Krafft has had significant links to Lebanon before her current year at AUB: her mother directed the Beirut Goethe Institute from 1998 to 2002; in 1994 she married Lebanese architect Karim Najjar, currently Visiting Assistant Professor with AUB’s Department of Architecture and Graphic Design; and in 1998 she held an installation exhibition, “seven deadly sins,” at the Goethe Institute.