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Here are SKH’s new PhD students
2025-02-03

Here are SKH’s new PhD students

We are pleased to welcome five new PhD students to SKH. Together they form an international group whose research projects cover a wide range of artistic disciplines and will contribute to developing and challenging artistic practice both nationally and internationally.
New PhD students 2025, picture of five PhD students
Ray Borg, Claudia Bosse, Anna Frida Maria Nilsson, Louise Ahl, Gwen Rakotovao (Photo: Johan Palme/SKH)

Anna Frida Maria Nilsson

During these research years, my wish is to explore creative processes for circus, with the aim of developing the art form and finding new ways of creating circus.

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Anna Frida Maria Nilsson 

Curiosity led me here. And a taste for challenges. When I asked my old circus school (now called ESAC) for my diploma they (the admin of ESAC) told me that I graduated just before the Bologna convention happened, and that my diploma therefore was useless. The admin then added that I had no chance of ever entering a university as a master or PhD student. So, I guess I ended up here by not listening to people who say that things are impossible.
Title of Anna Frida Marias PhD project: Research on Immersive Creation – a creation method for circus and other art forms.

Claudia Bosse

In taking seat in the cracks or wounds of the earth and absorbing them can performative and choreographic practice be learned from landscapes to reconnect with them?

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Claudia Bosse

I am a choreographer, performer, director, and head of the transdisciplinary theatercombinat in Vienna. My work explores violence, history, the uncanny, coexistence with non-human beings, and concrete utopias. I view my choreographies as “art of a temporary community,” blending myths, rituals, texts, and documents with bodies, materials, language, and objects to create site-specific works. I develop installations and performances in museums, landscapes, architecture, theatres, and urban spaces across Europe and beyond.
Title of Claudias PhD project: Hybrid Landscapes, An ecology with wounded areas, A research on rituals, bodies, knowledge, virtuality

Gwen Rakotovao 

My research explores the transformative and enduring nature of the Malagasy funeral ritual of Famadihana, using both dance and choreography to unravel its specificities. It also examines how studying these elements, across time and space, could inform contemporary choreographic practices and reveal their potential for future healing experiences through movement

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Gwen Rakotovao 

I am a dancer and choreographer now based in Europe after performing, dancing, and creating works for a decade in the United States. My interest in framing my work within cultural, historical, and social contexts led me to get a degree in Dance Studies (Arts du spectacle) from the University of Paris 8 and a Master’s in Performance Studies from New York University. My artistic creations and research delve into subjects such as rituals and movements of resistance.
Title of Gwens PhD project: Famadihana 2.0 I Embodied explorations: Investigating the essence of the famadihana ritual.

Louise Ahl

My research is focused on developing different formats for integrated audio description in performance, through the medium of choreography.

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Louise Ahl

I am a choreographer and performer from Stockholm. I have for the past 17 years lived in the UK working freelance within the field of performing arts. I am currently also studying to become an audio describer and hope to bring this knowledge to my project at SKH.
Title of Louises PhD project: Integrated Audio Description as a choreographic framing device for weird and experimental performance.

Ray Borg

I will be looking at different types of film manipulation, hoping to expand filmmaking methods fusing documentary and fiction in order to diversify notions of reality, and question ownership of truth.

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Ray Borg

I have been working as a freelance filmmaker and artist for the last 20 years, mainly in Sweden and in the UK. I work with documentary, experimental and hybrid- fiction films, mainly as a film director but also as a cinematographer, editor and dramaturge. 
Title of Rays PhD project: Factual Fabulation.


 

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