ELIA welcomes Dr Karin Mairitsch

Image: Rector ZHdK Karin Mairitsch. Source: ©Sam Khayari

We are delighted to welcome Dr Karin Mairitsch as the new rector of Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), an ELIA supporting member institution.

On 1 October, she will take up office and succeed Prof Thomas D. Meier, who will be stepping down as rector at the end of September.

ELIA has had the pleasure of working closely with Thomas D. Meier, who served as President of ELIA from 2014 – 2018. Together with ELIA and his own team at ZHdK, he hosted ELIA’s first-ever online Biennial conference in pandemic times (November 2020), which broke new technological ground on several fronts while connecting the ELIA community at a time when we needed it most.

All of us at ELIA have enjoyed working with Thomas and look forward to working with his predecessor. Karin Mairitsch is currently the head of Kultur123, the cultural centre of the city of Rüsselsheim which encompasses a department of culture and theatre, an adult education college, a music school, and a municipal library. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and completed her doctorate on study programme development at the University of Art and Design in Linz. She has held the position of vice rector of the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences and has continued her practice as an artist. We wish her every success in her new role.