Dr. Jana Johanna Haeckel is a Brussels-based curator, researcher, and lecturer specialising in photography and contemporary image cultures. She is the artistic director of düsseldorf photo+ Biennial for Photography 2027.
Her work explores the politics of images and bodies in contemporary art, with a particular focus on the shifting ethics of photography in the digital age. Through exhibitions, publications, and research projects, she investigates artistic practices that challenge dominant historical, colonial, and institutional narratives, often through critical engagements with archives and forms of visual memory. She holds a PhD in Art History and currently teaches the history and theory of photography, contemporary image practices, and exhibition-making to BA, MA, and PhD students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (KASK & Conservatorium). There, she also supervises the research cluster Archival Sensations, which investigates artistic approaches to archives, memory, and embodied forms of knowledge. She is an associate researcher at the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre For Photography
Prior to this, she served as director of Photoforum Pasquart, in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland (December 2021 - July 2023), where she has curated solo exhibitions with Bianca Baldi, Sheida Soleimani, Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Salvatore Vitale, among others. Prior to this, she has worked for the Cultural Department of the Goethe-Institut in Brussels, where she curated the nomadic art program Perruche (2018-2021) and supervised the international postcolonial project "Everything Passes Except the Past" (2019- 2020).
She was guest curator at Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung (2025) and Pinakothek der Moderne Munich (2020-2021) and co-curator of the annual Karma Ltd. Extended-art programme at Acud Gallery Berlin (2018). Moreover, she served as project manager for the public programme of the Belgian Pavilion with Dirk Braeckman at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and was doctoral researcher at UC Louvain/KU Leuven for the project "Photofilmic Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture" (2012-2016).
She lectured at University of Applied Science and Art Dortmund, Université Catholique de Louvain and LUCA School of Arts Brussels. Jana has guest lectured at various universities and art schools, such as HFBK Hamburg, Universität der Künste Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin.
She is an advising editor-at-large of Trigger magazine and a member of AICA Belgium & AICA International. Her essays and reviews have been published in The British Journal of Photography, Camera Austria, EIKON, Trigger, Monopol, Mousse Magazine, among others.
Education
2006
Literature Studies at Sorbonne Paris
2011
MA in Art History, Comparative Literature and French at Humboldt Universität and
Freie Universität Berlin
2012
Post-graduate Degree in Curatorial Studies at RUB and Kunstsammlung NRW
2016
PhD in Art History at UC Louvain