Margo Kirlan

Margo Kirlan holds a BA in English and American Studies from Charles University in Prague, where she wrote her BA thesis on the Beat Generation’s literary production in Paris between 1957 and 1960. She also studied English and American Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and participated in the Cinéma et Audiovisuel (CAV) programme, where she co-hosted and organised arts and performance events in galleries such as Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. During her university years she took part in several interdisciplinary research teams while developing her own independent work, and also participated in and co-organised readings during the one-year course Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image at the Film and Television School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In 2019, together with her university colleague, she presented the paper The Notion of Dérive: Psychogeographical Journeys in the Digital Era at the 8th Annual European Beat Studies Network Conference, which explored the relationship between environment, movement, and perception through the lens of psychogeography and Beat literature. After working in the arts and media sector in her early career, she gradually developed an independent research practice exploring questions of cognition, phenomenology, and human interaction with constrained environments, moving away from purely literary and philosophical approaches toward field-based inquiry. Her current research examines how isolation, machinery, and landscape interact in environments of extreme climate and how sustained interaction with constrained environments may influence cognition and agency.