Kathleen Coessens is a philosopher and artist, exploring the crossings of science and art, human creativity and cultural representations, embodiment and epistemology. She graduated in piano and chamber music in Paris (Ecole Normale de Musique A. Cortot) and Brussels (Royal Conservatoire) and subsequently studied philosophy, sociology and psychology at the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). In her PhD in philosophy she investigated cartography and mapping as fundamental aspects of the human condition.
She works as a professor and post-doctoral researcher at the VUB in the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science (CLWF), at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM), Ghent, and at the Royal Antwerp Conservatoire (music, dance and drama). She teaches semiotics, sociology of artistic practice and supervises PhD students in the arts at the conservatoires of Antwerp and Brussels. She publishes philosophical and artistic research, of which The Artistic Turn (2009) with D. Crispin and A. Douglas. Creating, performing and collaborating in diverse artistic projects (with Champ d'Action, Antwerp; Grays School of art, Aberdeen; ORCiM, Ghent), she integrates visual and performance arts and explores the boundaries between the cultural and the ecological, between art and life.
Coessens launched the artistic research group CORPoREAL at the Royal Antwerp Conservatoire.