Zurich, Vienna
Born 1966 in Linz a.d. Donau Austria studied Technical Mathematics at JKU Linz, moved to Zurich at the age of 23, and studied Fine Arts, Film/Video and Transdisciplinarity at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). After graduating film school in 1997, she worked as a camera assistant and cinematographer for feature and documentary films.
From 1998 to 2002, she was the co-author of the trans-media Expo.02 project Cyberhelvetia, which, in the pre-Facebook era, presented a virtual Switzerland online in search of “The Identity of the Swiss.” In 2002, it was exhibited as a staged, virtual swimming pool at the Expo in Biel, where participants could dive not into water but into various virtual realities. After developing the story concept, she was also responsible for the project’s visual execution.
Following Cyberhelvetia, Susanne Hofer co-founded the video production company flimmern.ch with Katrin Oettli in 2003 and has since produced her own videos and films as a director, cinematographer and editor. Additionally, in recent years, she has specialised in visual effects and animations, such as for the experimental documentary Looking Like My Mother by Dominique Margot, where she developed the visual concept and created the animations.
With flimmern GmbH, she produces commissioned films for NGOs, corporate image films (Bodum, Swiss National Library, ETH Zurich, etc.), for international museums and exhibitions, festivals, and location-specific video installations, as well as experimental videos and animations.
Since 2005, she has collaborated regularly theater and dance directors, producing stage projections and experimental films for their theater productions.
From 2004 to the present, she has been teaching:
at the Institute of Landscape Architectur at ETH Zurich, where she taught „Cinematic Perception of Space“ and headed the MediaLab, subsequently offering continous interdisciplinary courses at HSLU (Module IDA), teaching in the Digital Ideation program at the intersection of Computer Science and Art, and at ZHdK (Art Education).
Since 2013, she has been part of the collective INTOPOLITIKS with Antonia Beamish and Dominique Margot. Together, they are working on a transmedia project for children, which was awarded and supported as one of four projects by Swiss Transmedia Projects (BAK, ProHelvetia, Solothurn Film Festival, and Focal). The project continues to run on various channels. The latest endeavour is an immersive theater piece NOëLAND Cie in collaboration with the Fabriktheater Rote Fabrik and a documentary about the vision into the future of our youth. Working Title Memory into the future.
And in 2024 she teamed up with Sabine Hagmann for the Project A Woman in the World. A participatory transmedia project in the making.