Sonja Bäumel lives and works in Vienna and Amsterdam. Sonja is an artist with a particular affinity for microbes and embodied art. She is also an artistic researcher and arts-based educator. Her art practice explores the ‘in-between’ of bodies and environment. She probes the body as an expansion of its environment, and the environment as body, moving beyond the human to more-than-human beings. Through transdisciplinary collaborations she explores the cultural and perceptual dimensions of bodies which intends to redefine our relationship to spheres of seemingly invisible life.

Since 2025 she acts as a Senior Artist in the Department of Textiles at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where her current focus lies on artistic research. Sonja is also a guest tutor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she, together with Sonia Kazovsky, explores transdisciplinary and socially responsive forms of community-based art practices.

Until 2025 she was Head of the «Jewellery-Linking Bodies» Department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, focusing on embodied arts education. Sonja studied Fashion Design at the Fashion Institute Hetzendorf in Vienna. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arts in Linz and a Master’s degree in Conceptual Design in Context from the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She jointly founded experimental collectives in Amsterdam and Vienna to playfully experiment with collaborative art-science practices.

Sonja has been recognized for her innovative practice that interweaves contemporary art, scientific research, and the living ecologies of the human body. Her work has been presented and performed internationally, including: Anthology Film Archives, New York; Ars Electronica Center, Linz; Biennale Mediacity Seoul; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Micropia, Amsterdam; MOMENTUM, the Nordic Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moss; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Natural History Museum Vienna; Triennale Milano; Vienna Biennale for Change; ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, amongst others. In 2012, she was awarded the Outstanding Artist Award for the Project Textile Anatomy by the BMUKK Federal Ministry of Education, Art and Culture in Vienna. In 2022 she represented Austria at the 23rd Triennale Milano International Exhibition with the performative installation ENTANGLED RELATIONS—ANIMATED BODIES. In 2024, her project Expanded Self was awarded the Art & Design Award by ARTIS-Micropia, the world's only museum dedicated to microbes.