Andrea Messner was born in 1991 in Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. She studied philosophy, theater studies and art history in Munich, Rome, St Andrews, Erfurt, Berlin. Her interests involve critical theory, political and social philosophy, women’s history and feminist theory, concepts of history and the past, philosophy of the renaissance, the interfaces between art and philosophy, language(s) and translation(s), documentary film and documentation.
Based in Berlin and Rome, she works as a researcher, lecturer, translator, filmmaker, curator. She taught at LMU Munich, La Sapienza Rome, HU Berlin, and curated shows in Germany as well as Italy. For Goethe-Institut she translated into Italian award-winning German films such as Die Stille nach dem Schuss (Volker Schlöndorff), Der Samurai (Till Kleinert), Freistatt (Marc Brummund) or Beuys (Andres Veiel). Her own short movies and installations were shown at international festivals: Piazza Connection (2018) was featured at Manifesta 12 Palermo, Sardines (2019) and BIO|RATIONAL (2020) were presented at 37. Kasseler Dokfest.
Since 2021, Andrea has been part of the academic staff at the Institute of Philosophy at Humboldt-University Berlin and a member of RTG 2638 Normativity, Critique, Change. Here she is currently working on her dissertation project – headed “Gegen-Geschichte(n)” [English: “Counter-History“] – investigating the critical potential of resistant appropriations of the past.
Andrea’s most recent release with Freigeist Verlag is her German translation Dostojewski: Philosophie, Roman und religiöse Erfahrung (2022) by the Italian philosopher and hermeneuticist Luigi Pareyson.

Published with Freigeist Verlag:

Hate as a tranformative force – An essay on Walter Benjamin, in:

Experimentieren mit Flüssigkeit. Zur Bedeutung der Deutung in ›Die Verklärung des Gewöhnlichen‹ – Überlegungen mit Arthur C. Danto, in: