Curriculum

Charlotte Præstegaard Schwartz is Curator of Photography and Research Librarian and responsible for The National Collection of Photography at the Royal Danish Library. She is Mag. Art. and PhD in Art History. From 2019-2021 she was employed in a post-doctoral position at the National Gallery of Denmark, SMK, researching the photo-based part of SMK's collection. The project investigates the institutionalization of photography in Denmark and new presentations of the collection through the contemporary as a concept. Præstegaard Schwartz has been awarded a research grant from the New Carlsberg Foundation.

Præstegaard Schwartz specializes in art theory and history in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has been working intensely with avant-garde studies, especially conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, which has led to among other things the exhibition and the book Art as Idea. Conceptual Photography in Denmark 1965 - 1979, The Royal Library (2007). In 2004-2006 Præstegaard Schwartz was curator at ARKEN Museum for Modern Art, and from 2008 to 2011 she worked as curator at Museet for Fotokunst, Brandts. She has researched both the history of photography as well as the contemporary use of the medium, which was the theme of her PhD, The Postmedial Photography (2014). She was part of the research project "Towards a New Culture Concept and New Forms of Cultural Dissemination" at The Southern University of Denmark from 2014-2017 supported by the Velux Foundation. In this research project, Præstegaard Schwartz took a critical view of today's political and cultural focus on participation through practice-based studies of historical and contemporary institutional critique.

Præstegaard Schwartz has arranged a number of conferences, most recently Institutional infrastructure. New modes, collaborations, and platforms for artistic production, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2019), and WHERE PHOTOGRAPHY BELONGS. The production of communities and the experience of solidarity and belonging within historical and contemporary photography, The Royal Library (2017). She has curated numerous exhibitions. The most recent ones include Exchanging Money for Working Space or Money Equals Working Space, SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen (2017) and Family, work, art, surrounding, Gallery Tom Christoffersen, Copenhagen (2017). Since 2017 Præstegaard Schwartz has been in charge of the art program and the international residency program at the independent art institute Astrid Noacks Atelier in Copenhagen.

She has contributed with articles to several anthologies, catalogues and journals, including “Rooms, Hexagons, Images and Other Investigations. Stig Brøgger's Photography Based Art from the 1960s and 1970s” (2019), and “Artivism and Para-institution: The Partisan Café and the Museum of Burning Questions, Bergen Assembly 2016 ” (2018, with Professor Anne Scott Sørensen, SDU). Museum Tusculanum Press publishes Præstegaard Schwartz’ book Billedtilstande in 2020.

Since 2015, Præstegaard Schwartz has been an Advisory Board Member and a member of the program committee of the Copenhagen Photo Festival. In 2017, she received a prize for her curatorial work by the Danish Arts Foundation, and in 2011 she was awarded Asta and Mario Krohn's scholarship for Danish art historians.