clarissa thieme is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher whose work focuses on the fissures between individual memory and its violent translation into historical objectification, exploring counter-strategies of a living archive as a new commons and vulnerability as the core of solidarity and resistance. Central to her practice is a collaborative and participatory mode developed over many years, one that invites colleagues, artists, and communities into processes of exchange in which different experiences, knowledges, and positionalities are the very substance of the work.

Since the 2000s, Thieme has maintained a long-term engagement with the post-Yugoslav space, most centrally with the film collective Save the Amazon Production at the Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Archive Sarajevo. Her current research project, Save the Amazon – Resumption, traces the transfer of the collective's media activist strategies — developed during the Bosnian War (1992–1996) to counter ethno-nationalist narratives — into a present-day translocal network of feminist queer anti-fascist artists, filmmakers, and activists across Berlin, Vienna, and Istanbul. She is a co-founder of ARchipelago, a participatory AR archiving platform in the post-Yugoslav context, and of the open-archive initiative Između Nas/Between Us at the Video Archive Sarajevo.

Together with Diyarbakır-based artist and landscape architect Rozelin Akgün, Thieme has recently completed the essay film Vulnerability in Resistance, the first in a series of filmic explorations tracing the structures of violence and alliances of resistance across shifting geopolitical sites. The series asks how solidarity can be genuinely internationalist when capitalist exploitation and entangled violent histories undeniably are. Together with Christina Stuhlberger, she co-curates Filmic Solidarities – Dialogues for a New Commons in Vienna, and is a permanent programmer for the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) in Osnabrück.

Thieme's work has been presented at Berlinale, Sarajevo Film Festival, Viennale, Olhar de Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, as well as at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Savvy Contemporary, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Kasa Galeri Istanbul, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, among others. Her work is part of the collections of Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and n.b.k. Video-Forum, and is distributed by Arsenal Distribution Berlin and sixpackfilm Vienna. She is a film lecturer at Leuphana University Lüneburg and a doctoral candidate in artistic research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw).