Emily is an artist, researcher, and educator. She holds a BA in Fine Art at the University of the Arts Utrecht (NL), a Research MA Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam (NL) and an MA Education in Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam (NL).

As an artist, she creates video and lecture performances, and performative installations. A clean aesthetic and a simple gesture or act is central to the video works, they are framed around the act that is performed. The installations are processes set into motion, typically referring to an experimental set-up. The lecture performances are in essence an attempt to express thoughts, the intertwinement of thinking and doing. They drift in-between the theoretical and the artistic, the intellectual and the experiential. Every work is a new attempt and can also be a re-interpretation.

As a researcher, her fascination with the essay-form came to fruition with her MA thesis PER-FORM, the performative essay and the essayistic performance, which developed ideas first explored in her BA thesis Un Essai d’essayer. The practical implementation of the research was developed in her research/educational project for her second MA Essaying Art, an unmethodological method for Artistic Research. This research has been published as an academic paper and presented multiple times as a lecture performance, at the 2018 SAR Conference for Artistic Research in Plymouth (UK) and the 2018 Didactic Art Conference on Teaching Artistic Research in Vienna (AT) among others. The educational project was developed for the University of Amsterdam (NL). Currently, she has a teaching position at the MA Art Education Tilburg (NL). Emily is also the initiator and organizer of Café Chercher, an art cafe providing a platform for unfinished art and research projects. She works as a project creator and manager at the Sandberg Institute (NL) and is a freelance project co-ordinator for art and research events for institutes like ARIAS (NL).

Emily Huurdeman (2018)

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“Emily Huurdeman: Heeft met enorme toewijding residuen van haar persoonlijke gevoelsleven benut.” (Jan Naaikensprijs, juryrapport 2014)

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“With intriguing simplicity she manages to create a poetic image that surprises and twinges and where the passage of time and the process is put into motion with a simple action is the base of the videos” Marleen Hartjes (work description for solo exposition for Matter Matters at TAC Eindhoven 2015)