Frances Breden is a curator and arts educator dedicated to community-based and collective art-making in digital and IRL spaces.
Since she came from Vancouver to Berlin in 2014, she has been part of the queer feminist art collective COVEN BERLIN, where she makes art and exhibitions, always with a breath of queer humour and play. Frances is a founding member of Sickness Affinity Group, a collective that offers support on accessibility, disability, and illness since 2017. Her newest collective from 2021 is Complainers and Killjoys, which hosts workshops on the intoxicating power of meme-making as a form of art criticism.
In 2020, Frances was awarded the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Arts Education and Outreach Stipendium for the workshop series Making Queer with Harley Aussoleil, where they focussed on queer identity and experimental art as mutually informative, ever-shifting practices.
In 2020 and 2023, together with RA Walden, she curated the accessible, experimental video art screening PRESENTS, shown in Berlin at HAU2, Vancouver at VIVO, and online. She has worked as a curatorial advisor on accessibility for digital residencies with Vital Capacities and the University of Atypical UK (2022) and IRL residencies with Sikås Art Center Sweden (2024).
Frances studied in the Master's programme Art in Context at the UdK Berlin, where she was editorial lead of the student magazine eigenart, focussing on accessibility and digitality. Out of her thesis work there, she developed Counterspeculative Constellations, a research project and card deck on queer-feminist uses of Tarot and astrology in contemporary artistic practice.
From 2024-2026 Frances is carrying out a curatorial fellowship with the Galerie im Turm. There, she has curated the exhibitions and events programmes HOLE*Y MAGIC, Hoffnung أمل (reviewed in Berlin Art Link, publication forthcoming), and COSMIC GIRLBOSS (reviewed in Texte zur Kunst, publication forthcoming). Frances supported Meyad Sarsour-Ndaye in a one-year fellowship in the creation of a multilingual Sign language-first film.
Please feel free to reach out at franni.breden@proton.me. 🫧
Image - Mareike Lange
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