Sonya Merutka

Sonya Merutka is a writer, scholar, and community organizer living in Brooklyn, New York.

Their academic research explores queer-weighted time and movement in contemporary performance art, dance, sound, and poetic practice. Sonya is currently a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, where they are writing on crip temporality and language in the work of Mel Baggs and JJJJJerome Ellis. They hold a master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University, a certificate in Photography from the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin, and a bachelor’s degree in Feminist Philosophy and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

They were born and grew up in San Diego, California and moved to Berlin in their early twenties to learn German, study photography, cook in a Greek cafe, and work with international artists doing research and producing large-scale museum exhibitions across Europe, where they lived for almost a decade. They continue their work with artists in New York.

Dedicated to the publishing and study of queer and trans authors, Sonya is an editorial member of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, the co-founder and organizer of Queer Theory Reading Group, a community-based education forum for critical queer studies that they started in Berlin in 2015, and is a member of Queer Detainee Empowerment Project in New York.

Sonya will be in residence at Can Serrat during August 2023.