Denise Petzold (D.)

Denise Petzold is Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage and Performance Art at the Department of Literature & Art at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She's affiliated with the ‘Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music’ (MCICM) and the 'Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation, and Heritage' (MACCH). She is also a Gangmaker at the music centre de Bijloke for the theme 'canon' and a member of the Netherlands Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). 

Denise has a background in science and technology studies, contemporary art conservation studies, and museum and heritage studies. Her research interests revolve around the role of technology and science in artistic practice and heritage conservation, practices of care in the arts, the life cycles of performative artworks, ephemeral materials and new materialisms, as well as processes of craftsmanship and making. She's also interested in experimental methods inspired by the arts and versatile in several qualitative methods such as ethnography, archival research, discourse analysis, etc.

Currently, she conducts research for the project (Re-)Imagining Collection Care for Classical Music Canons as part of the Dutch Sector Plan of the Humanities. There, she explores how practices of “collection care” - traditionally associated with museums - emerge in classical music institutions, examining how people, institutional identities, objects, and repertoires are sustained and transformed through care. Through ethnographic case studies, including the Buurt Opera Malpertuis (BOM) at Opera Zuid, the project investigates how social inclusion, artistic innovation, and heritage practices intersect, reimagining who and what is cared for in classical music amid contemporary social and political change.

In her PhD project before all of this, entitled Archives of Change: An Art Conservation Studies Approach to Innovating Classical Music (2023), Denise already brought together classical music and contemporary art conservation, seeking to rethink how classical music might be brought into the future in meaningful ways from the perspective of its practitioners. Thereby, she addressed the tension between conserving and innovating artistic heritage in a highly professional and tradition-loaden community of actors. The thesis was supervised by  Prof. dr. Peter Peters and Prof. dr. Karin Bijsterveld.

Denise has also worked as an assistant curator at the contemporary art museum Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany, where she co-organised two large-scale exhibitions including their accompanying publications (see here and here). After completing a research internship at Tate for the project 'Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art', London, during her graduate studies, Denise focused her research on the conservation of performance art, more specifically the role of documentation in shaping the lives of performative artworks in museums.

Denise coordinates and teaches various courses across several Bachelor and Master programmes at the faculty, in particular the BA Arts & Culture and the MA Arts & Culture (specialisation Arts and Heritage: Policy, Management and Education) and supervises both MA and BA theses.

[Portrait photo by Björn Comhaire for de Bijloke]