Sonja Bäumel is an artist with a particular affinity for microbes and embodied art. She is also an artistic researcher and arts-based educator. Since 2025 she acts as a Senior Artist in the Department of Textiles at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where her current focus lies on artistic research. Sonja is also a guest tutor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she teaches collaboratively to explore how how inter- and transdisciplinary artistic practices can act as meaningful forms of participation and to encourage students to engage with society through collective making. Sonja gives public lectures and facilitates workshops at various international educational and cultural art institutions.

Until 2025 she acted as head of the «Jewellery-Linking Bodies» Department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, focusing on embodied arts education. Sonja studied Fashion Design at the Fashion Institute Hetzendorf in Vienna. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arts in Linz and a Master’s degree in Conceptual Design in Context from the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She jointly founded experimental collectives in Amsterdam and Vienna to playfully experiment with collaborative art-science practices.

Sonja’s own art practice explores the ‘in-between’ of bodies and environment. She probes the body as an expansion of its environment, and the environment as body, moving beyond the human to more-than-human beings. Through transdisciplinary collaborations she explores the cultural and perceptual dimensions of bodies which intends to redefine our relationship to spheres of seemingly invisible life. Sonja’s work has been presented and performed internationally, and she has been recognized for her innovative practice that interweaves contemporary art, scientific research, and the living ecologies of the human body.

www.sonjabaeumel.at