Iris Fraueneder is a film and media scholar. Her dissertation Pulsing Images, which she defended at the University of Zurich in July 2025, explores absences and alternative modes of existence of images from Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, which for political and historical reasons are deprived of visibility, materially unavailable, or inexistent. It examines contemporary interventions in the unavailability of these (moving) images, focusing on filmic practices that propose an understanding of reality that is not representation-positivist, but also considers layers of the invisible as real and constitutive of reality.

Currently, she works at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History and teaches at the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. Since 2015, she has been active with the film curatorship collective “Diskollektiv”. From 2017 to 2021 she was an SNF research fellow at the University of Zurich in the project “Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South”. As part of her doctoral project, she participated in the PhD-lab “Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices” (Collegium Helveticum) and was affiliated with the Orient Institute Beirut and the American University Beirut. From 2017 to 2020, she was an associate member of the Graduate Research Training Program “Configurations of Film”.