Yasmine Ostendorf

Yasmine Ostendorf is a researcher, curator and founder of the Green Art Lab Alliance, a network of over 50 cultural organisations in Europe, Latin America and Asia in pursuit of social and environmental justice. The alliance, that acts like a mycelium, is the fruit of over a decade of research she conducted in Asia, Latin-America and Europe on artists proposing alternative ways of living and working; ways that ultimately shape more sustainable, interconnected and resilient communities. She has worked on international cultural mobility programmes and on the topic of art and ecology on behalf of expert organisations, including Julie’s Bicycle (United Kingdom), Bamboo Curtain Studio (Taiwan), Cape Farewell (United Kingdom), Labverde (Brazil) and Trans Artists (Netherlands). She is the author of a series of guides, called “Creative Responses to Sustainability,” published by the Asia-Europe Foundation (Singapore) and the Ecologic Institute (Germany). She is a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Forum (Austria) and of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (Germany). She works as an associate curator for Valley of the Possible (Chile) and for C-Platform (China). She is the founder of the Nature Research Department at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (2017, Netherlands), the Van Eyck Food Lab (2018) and the Future Materials Bank (2020). She has been organising Food Art Film Festivals showcasing innovative and sustainable food/art practices whilst building local networks between artists and regenerative farmers across the globe. She has also participated as curator-in-residence at Kunst Haus Wien (Austria), Capacete (Brazil) and with colectivo amasijo (Mexico). Yasmine is currently writing a book called ‘Mycelium as Methodology’ looking at biomimicry of system-design through a mycological lens.