Friederike Schäfer is an art historian and occasionally pursues cultural/curatorial projects. She studied art history and North American studies (with culture and sociology as majors) at Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Washington, Seattle. From 2013 to 2017, she was a Doctoral Fellow in the project "Mobile Spaces" of the EXC Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Humboldt-University of Berlin. Before joining Research Area 2 "Travelling Matters" of the EXC 2020 Temporal Communities in 2021, she was the Academic Associate for Media Art / Photography at Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe). She further works as a lecturer and thesis advisor at the COOP Design Research – M.Sc. Program of Bauhaus Dessau and Anhalt University of Applied Sciences.

While working on her dissertation project Claiming Space(s). Locating Suzanne Harris’ Dance Practice and Ephemeral Installations within New York City in the 1970s at Humboldt-University of Berlin, Friederike Schäfer held several fellowships, such as at the Bard Graduate Center, NYC, the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montréal, and the Terra Summer Residency, Giverny, France. In 2021, she received a Terra Publication Grant to publish her doctoral thesis with De Gruyter.

Before that, Friederike Schäfer worked as curatorial and project assistant for international exhibitions, such as dOCUMENTA (13), KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin and the archive project re.act.feminism 2 - a performing archive, AdK Berlin. She also conceives collaborative research and exhibition projects (including for nGbK Berlin, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg) and is the co-founder of CoCooN Berlin, an initiative for the development and promotion of a sustainable and decentralised conservation policy for contemporary art and culture.

Current research includes an EXC 2020 post-doctoral research project, Earth(ly) Matters. How Natural Environments Travelled to Exhibition Spaces (Working Title) (2021-).