Gabrielle Schaad, born in 1982 in Aarau, Switzerland, is a curator, researcher, and critic. From 2002 to 2010 she studied art history, East Asian art history, and medieval archeology at the Faculty of Arts at University of Zurich and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris/France. She was a visiting research student at the Graduate School of Cultural Science, Saitama University, Japan (2013–2014), and a teaching assistant at the Chair for Art History and Visual Culture, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan (2014). She completed her dissertation at the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture, gta, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland in fall 2016. Her PhD “Performing Environmental Textures – Intersected Bodies of Gutai and Metabolism (Japan, 1955–1972)” examines the production of space at the interface of artistic performance and architectural design in postwar Japan with a focus on the Gutai group and Osaka Expo ’70 in the era of technological optimism.

Schaad has published on contemporary art and architecture of postmodernism in Switzerland. Publications include »›…and that an image is also a thought and a text‹. Gabrielle Schaad in conversation with Trix and Robert Haussmann«, in: Trix and Robert Haussmann, Zurich 2012; forthcoming is the essay »Expo ’70. Carte postale ou image dystopique? Introduction à une mise en scène,« in: Fred Turner: La corporation et la contre-culture, Paris 2016.

She has contributed to the magazines Archithese, Artforum, Domus, Flash Art, Frieze d/e, Kunstbulletin, and PIN-UP. Schaad has been awarded research scholarships by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2011–2013/2015) and by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT, 2013–2014).

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