Ruth Mateus Berr
Bio
Photo : Max Kropitz
Ruth Mateus-Berr, PhD, Full Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, is an artist, researcher, and social designer whose work connects arts-based research, art therapy, and participatory design in the fields of protection, health, and mental well-being. As co-lead of the Working Group on Protection, Trauma, and Mental Health (Adults and Children) within the Steering Committee Observatory on Arts and Cultural Education in Crisis and Post-Conflict Contexts (Art to Face), she focuses on resilience, trauma recovery, and creative empathy through art and design.
She has done community-based projects in a mother–child hospital and an orphanage in Armenia, in schools in Damascus, and with children who fled the Yugoslav war. During the 2015/16 refugee crisis, she initiated inclusive art classes integrating children from refugee shelters into Austrian schools and collaborated with a teacher from Afghanistan. She also participated in Tanz die Toleranz (Dance the Tolerance) by Royston Maldoom, emphasizing art as a medium for empathy and social cohesion.
She founded the collective Politics of Fear, through which she worked with refugees and students from the Department of Social Design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and refugees on themes of fear of the “other” during the refugee crisis. The collective organized numerous workshops and presented national and international exhibitions such as No Hope No Fear at Kunst Haus Wien/Garage, exploring fear, empathy, and social engagement through artistic intervention. For many years, she served as president of the Community Arts Group Sambaschule Rot-Weiß-Rot in Vienna, promoting intercultural dialogue, participation, and inclusion through collaborative art and performance projects.
Her international research projects — including DEMEDARTS (Dementia.Empathy.Education.Arts, FWF PEEK Grant AR609, DOI: 10.55776/AR609), INTERACCT (Child Cancer Therapy E-Health Platform -FFG), Art4Science-WWF WKP, Design & Dis-Ability, and Co-Ability (Austria–Hungary-BMEIA) — explore intersections of creativity, health, and social inclusion. The Co-Ability project, developed in collaboration with the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest and other projects, were nominated for the New European Bauhaus Award and recognized as a national Ars Docendi Best Practice example for excellence in university teaching.
She is a certified art therapist and currently training as a Nonviolent Communication (NVC) trainer. She serves on the Scientific-Artistic Advisory Board of SIAM – Salzburg Institute for Arts in Medicine and the Healthy Museum Project at the University for Continuing Education Krems.
Most recently, she developed METÀDIS, an arts-based research method for re-experiencing and transforming difficult events, presented in her forthcoming publication Resilience through Creative Empathy (Mateus-Berr, 2026). Her academic writing also reflects her engagement with peace, ethics, and social responsibility — for example, in Danger of Truth in Denken. Kunst. Frieden (2018). Her work is guided by a deep commitment to democracy, human dignity, and mutual respect, irrespective of origin, identity, or background — values that underpin her teaching, research, and community engagement.