Summer workshop programme

Develop your artistic practice further, connect with international artists, and create new spaces for artistic exchange together at the Berlin Summer University of the Arts 2025. From June to September, the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) offers a diverse workshop program aimed at artists, advanced students and graduates from all artistic disciplines. Over 30 courses in Fine Arts, Design, Music, Sound Arts and Performing Arts as well as interdisciplinary formats invite you to take part. Registration is now open.

This edition’s program will take place under the motto UTOPIA:

What does an ideal world look like? How can we collectively shape our present and future? In times marked by instability and uncertainty, what role can art play in processing experiences, challenging existing boundaries, and carving out alternative spaces? The course program invites you to dive into these questions and explore visions of a better world through your artistic practice.

Our course program reflects the engaging dialogue between the arts and a broader societal context, opening up spaces for research, activism and experimentation. You can find a small selection of our workshops below. Discover all courses here.

What better place to set the scene for utopian explorations than the city? In the performance workshop Overwriting Berlin: Utopian Futures participants will create audio walks that bring to life a vision of Berlin in the year 2025. The course NO UTOPIA: Artivism and Collective Action Today takes a close look at current developments in urban areas. As part of the course, participants will visit and exchange ideas with various Berlin-based artivist groups, and in turn develop their own interventions within the city space.

The topic of sustainability becomes both a thematic as well as practical focus. The course Upcycling Utopia not only explores practical upcycling techniques, but also aims to question the narratives and dogmas carried by our clothing. The course Let’s Get Circular instructed by set designer Christina Mrosek and visual artist Gunilla Jähnichen explores the artistic possibilities of a perfect cycle using just one material: cardboard.

Alternative (future) worlds are a central theme in the discourse on utopias and therefore also in the course program. Researcher Gabriela Manda Seith and artist Matthias Böhler understand utopia as a place of love and care between humans and other species, and want to explore this vision critically and artistically with their course World Order of Our Hearts. This approach is also shared by the course Waters in Venus—Flowers in Mars: Risograph Zine for Uncommon Utopias, where participants will create their own zines depicting non-anthropocentric and decolonial visions of the future.

Visit here for detailed information on our program and its workshops, as well as online application. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us: summer-courses [​at​] udk-berlin.de.