Kate Donovan, Dr. des.

Kate Donovan  is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the interdisciplinary program 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics (July 2025–March 2026). She is an artist, curator, and researcher whose work engages with ecological thinking, media theory, and artistic research, with a particular emphasis on listening, radio, and the more-than-human. Her research and practice investigate transmission and reception as both method and metaphor, attending to processes of movement, flow, and holding across sonic, energetic, and material registers. This includes a concern with eco-materialities and the energetic entanglements of media, as well as the afterlives and resonances of archival or museal objects.

She completed her doctoral thesis, "Radio as Relation: Listening across Worlds of Artistic Research, Technologies and the More-than-Human" (2025), within the research group SENSING: The knowledge of sensitive media at the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM), University of Potsdam. The thesis develops a relational theory of radio and electromagnetic frequencies, challenging anthropocentric and techno-modernist paradigms in the context of the Anthropocene.

Her work is often collaborative and has been presented in a range of contexts, including the Sonic Acts Biennial, Struer Tracks Biennial for Sound & Listening, Werkleitz Festival, and the Museum for Communication in Berlin and Frankfurt. She is a co-founder of Radio Otherwise, an artistic research project focused on environment-specific listening and transmission in dialogic exchange. Among other contexts, she has given invited lectures and workshops at institutions including the University of the Arts Helsinki, University of Copenhagen, Leuphana University Lüneburg, University of the Arts Berlin (UdK), and the European Media Studies program in Potsdam.