Iris Fraueneder is a film, media and cultural studies scholar and works as a senior researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH).
She studied theater, film and media studies at the University of Vienna and completed her studies with a thesis on the transformation of Masao Adachi’s militant cinema aesthetics being reflected by Eric Baudelaire’s essayistic documentary THE ANABASIS… (F 2011).
In July 2025, she received her doctorate in cultural analysis from the University of Zurich with a dissertation entitled Pulsing Images. Interventions in the Unavailability of Images in Lebanese, Palestinian and Israeli Films. The thesis deals with various forms of unavailability of images in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine: films and photographs that have been withdrawn from view for political reasons or due to historical developments, that are materially intangible or non-existent (censored, destroyed, unmade, unfinished, etc.). It examines contemporary cinematic and artistic interventions in the unavailability of such (moving) images, focusing on practices whose understanding of reality is not representational positivist, but rather presupposes layers of the invisible as real and constitutive of reality.
Fraueneder currently teaches at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. She has been active in the film curation collective ‘Diskollektiv’ since 2015. From 2017 to 2021, she was a research assistant and doctoral candidate in the interdisciplinary SNSF project ‘Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South’ at the University of Zurich. As part of her doctoral project, she participated in the PhD-lab ‘Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices’ (Collegium Helveticum, UZH/ETH/ZHdK), was affiliated with the Orient Institute Beirut and the American University Beirut, and was an associate member of the Graduiertenkolleg ‘Configurations of Film’ at Goethe University, Frankfurt.
At the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society (LBIGG), which was renamed Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH) in March 2019, she worked on various research projects since 2012, including “Ephemeral Films: National Socialism in Austria” (2011-2016, Future Fund of the Republic of Austria), “Exploring the interwar world: The travelogues of Colin Ross (1885-1945)” (2015-2017, FWF Austrian Science Fund), “I-Media-Cities” (2016–2019, EU Horizon 2020), and “Educational Film Practice in Austria” (2019-2023, FWF Austrian Science Fund). She is currently part of the Vienna Time Machine project.