After an extensive preparatory phase, two Professional Doctorate candidates have started at the research group What Art Knows at Academy of Arts Maastricht at Zuyd. In the coming years, Céline Mathieu and Sina Seifee will work on their own practice-based artistic research projects, in the context of MERIAN (a collaboration between Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht University, and the Jan van Eyck Academie).
What is a PD?
The Professional Doctorate (PD) is a national pilot-program for professionals who aim to develop their research. The PD is the equivalent of the PhD for the Dutch Universities of the Applied Sciences. The aim of the PD is to push boundaries within professional practice and society at large. A key principle of a PD in the arts and creative domain is a practice-based research question, developed in collaboration with a consortium of societal and private partners, with an artistic, performative, or design-based project or product at its core. The Arts + Creative PD program has been developed by professors from 15 universities for arts and design in the Netherlands. At Zuyd, the pilot-PD takes place at the research centre Global Minds & Work and the research centre What Art Knows.
Céline Mathieu: ‘Conditions for Raw Materials’
Céline Mathieu is an artist and writer, whose practice arranges sound, scent, text, sculptural elements and performance in space. Her work is often both sensory and conceptual, and tends to be site-and condition-specific. In her PD-research project ‘Conditions for Raw Materials’, Céline examines what it means to “sustain” an artistic practice by addressing three fundamental challenges in contemporary art: the life of material before and after the exhibition; the value of art and the labour that goes into it; and the place of text as a tool to mediate, archive and speculate exhibitions. Using her exhibitions alongside auto-theoretical writing reflections, the PD-project seeks to question notions of value in contemporary art, developing an alternative economic model while making visible the material, financial, and relational flows within exhibitions.
Céline Mathieu, ‘Throat’ (detail), 2025, ribbed, smooth and rusted layering with an optical in-between, acrylic cases. Courtesy of the artist and of Gauli Zitter
Portrait by Vika Paskelyte
Sina Seifee: ‘How to inherit stories? – Artistic Research as Constructive and Critical Memory Work’
Sina’s PD-project explores how virtual world-building, inspired by high dark fantasy, can serve as a medium for reimagining pre-modern Persian bestiaries. By investigating the potential of interactive 3D media as a medium of artistic research, this project positions the creative process as a critical intervention within the context of the Iranian diaspora, where memory practices are explored through creative and experimental digital craftsmanship, offering new ways to reimagine and respond to heritage today.
About MERIAN
MERIAN is a space for collaborative research in between making and thinking. PhD candidates engage in innovative styles of research, utilizing the powers and fragilities of artistic and scientific practices. Their research addresses urgent matters of societal concern apparent in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion. This collaboration between Maastricht University, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences and the Jan van Eyck Academie builds on existing expertise from the research, arts and higher education networks in Maastricht. The distinct Maastricht style of ‘research in and through the arts’ is problem-based, methodologically innovative, and focuses on interdisciplinary topics that can fruitfully be.
