Ulrike Gerhardt is the artistic (co-)director of D’EST since its founding in 2016, nowadays leading the platform together with Suza Husse. As a visual culture studies scholar and curator, she has been researching cultural memory concerning the reverberations of the post-socialist transformation. For her PhD at Leuphana University Lueneburg, she analyzed the ways in which video works by queer-feminist artists and collectives of the “generation transformation” visually deal with the experiences of Perestroika, migration, ecosystems of damage, and indexical landscapes after 1989 / 1991. In 2024, her study on Easternfuturist memory practices within post-socialist video art will be published (Berlin: De Gruyter). After holding positions at District*School Without Center, the FHNW Academy for Art and Design in Basel, Potsdam University, and the Michael Succow Foundation / Greifswald Mire Centre, she will start working as a research associate at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in spring 2024.