Lea Luka Sikau

Lea Luka Sikau situates her practice at the intersection of new opera and vibrotactile art.

She completed her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, investigating how posthuman futures can be simulated within rehearsal processes of contemporary opera. Her research on opera, failure, posthumanism, digestion and rehearsal has been published in four languages, amongst others within Cambridge and Oxford University Press. As a Fellow at the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University and a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Art, Science and Technology (MIT), she has been recognized for her work on art-science processes with the Bavarian Cultural Award and the Oxford Cultural Leader Fellowship. She is a board member of the German Young Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina/BBAW) and serves as spokesperson for its Sustainability Working Group. Lea Luka teaches on multisensory environments, rehearsal ethnography, artificial intelligence, and artistic research, among others at Seoul National University, Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Cambridge, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

She has collaborated with Romeo Castellucci, Marina Abramović, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Laetitia Sonami, and Rimini Protokoll. As a media artist, she co-founded the internationally acclaimed media art duo sikau/pubalova in 2020, which develops multisensory works involving machine learning for institutions such as the European Commission, the Ligeti Center, Ars Electronica Festival, transmediale Berlin, Ensemble Modern, and Climate Week NYC. Their solo exhibitions have been presented at venues including Kunsthalle Praha, Science Gallery Bengalore, LABoral Centro de Arte, and gnration (European Media Art Residency).

As the leading Curator for Music and Sound Art, Lea Luka Sikau has shaped the sonic profile of ZKM Center for Art and Media, including major platforms such as the next_generation festival and the Giga-Hertz Festival, as well as its artistic research program. She is responsible for the conception of international residencies and the staging of the sound dome. In this context, she initiated the Global Sonic Research Residency (in collaboration with MUTEK, Arts Council Korea, and HELLERAU) and launched a multisensory performance series in collaboration with partners including Arts at CERN, CripRave, and Schloss Solitude.