Dr. Anna-Sophie Springer is a curator, publisher, and educator working at the intersection of artistic practice, environmental humanities, and cultural history. Since 2023, she has been Acting Professor of Transformation Design at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (HBK), where her work explores how ecological, historical, and aesthetic methodologies can inform art and design practices for socio-environmental change.

Her internationally recognized research has helped shape the ecological turn in curatorial and artistic practice. Through exhibitions, publications, and public programs, she investigates how knowledge systems—particularly those of natural history, science, and cultural institutions—are embedded in colonial legacies and global resource economies. Her long-term project Reassembling the Natural, and pioneering work on the “world as forest,” have both advanced new curatorial approaches to multispecies relations and ecological repair. Drawing on Aby Warburg’s concept of Bilderfahrzeuge, she examines how images, materials, and knowledge circulate across time and space—from colonial expeditions to contemporary bioeconomic infrastructures.

At HBK, her teaching and research in the context of the Transportation Design professorship interrogate the connections among mobility, fossil fuel economies, technological systems, and the ecological crisis. Her current focus includes fieldwork on algae and seaweed as living agents of multiscalar coevolution—tracing their roles in oceanic thinking, economies of abundance, and planetary governance beyond the human. These investigations build on previous research into plantation ecologies and land governance in Southeast Asia.

As the founder of K. Verlag, a Berlin-based experimental press, Springer develops publishing as both artistic medium and epistemic practice. This work has received international recognition, including the Deutscher Verlagspreis in 2020 and 2023. Her editorial projects include the acclaimed intercalations: paginated exhibitions series, the Processing Process series, co-edited volumes such as Fantasies of the Library (MIT Press), and Inter folia aves, her Spanish-language monograph published by Greylock Editions in 2024. Her forthcoming co-authored book Productions of Nature (Open Humanities Press) is supported in part by an HBK research grant.
Springer completed her PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her pedagogical approach fosters inquiry-led methodologies and interdisciplinary collaboration, mentoring students in developing practices that address complex environmental and societal challenges with critical imagination and situated engagement.