The North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Arts (AWK) has accepted Prof. Dr. Ursula Frohne, co-director of the Centre for Advanced Study, as a new member. At the academy’s annual celebration on 14 May 2025, the AWK Executive Board welcomed twelve new members who stand out for their expertise and research. The new members’ fields range from history to photonics.

Ursula Frohne's research focuses on the role of exhibitions as a form of knowledge and transcultural perspectives on the socio-economic conditions of art. These are questions that the art historian has been confronted with in practice since the beginning of her academic career: from 1995 to 2001, she was chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the ZKM | Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. At the same time, she taught at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG). Since 2015, she has held the professorship for art history at the University of Münster, focusing on modern and contemporary art. Her research interests include contemporary art practices, including technological art practices such as photography, film, video, installation art and digital art forms.

In addition, the art historian deals with the political dimensions of art and visual culture. Before moving to Münster, Ursula Frohne taught as a professor of 20th and 21st century art history at the University of Cologne from 2006 to 2015 and as a professor of art history at the International University Bremen from 2002 to 2006. She was a visiting professor at the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in the United States. In 2014, she was awarded the Leo Spitzer Prize for Excellence in Research and Teaching by the University of Cologne. From 2014 to October 2019, she was co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (Journal of Art History); in 2019, she founded the open access journal “21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual / Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur (Contributions to Art History and Visual Culture)” with art historian and Leibniz Prize winner Johannes Grave.