Frances Breden is a curator and artist dedicated to community-based and collective art-making in digital and IRL spaces. She has a special interest in collective writing and self-publishing practices, from online workshops, to memes, to zines.

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.

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. Her thesis, Counterspeculative Constellations, was on queer-feminist uses of Tarot and astrology in contemporary artistic practice. It resulted in lectures and card readings at the University of Edinburgh and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, as well as a peer-reviewed essay in JAWS Journal in 2025.

From 2024-2026 Frances is carrying out a curatorial fellowship with the Galerie im Turm. Frances curated the exhibition HOLE*Y MAGIC there in 2025.

Please feel free to reach out at franni.breden@proton.me. 🫧

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