Gallery Talk | From Source to Afterlife: How Images Become New Stories

About the Speaker: Frauke Thielecke is an award-winning filmmaker, theater director, and screenwriter. She has directed 13 feature films and more than 100 episodes of television drama, developing a distinctive approach to narrative, genre, and adaptation. Her short film Dunkelrot (Dark Red) received the Max Ophüls Prize, and her graduation film Abendlied (Evening Song) won the Studio Hamburg Young Talent Award. Currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Thielecke is a member of the International Writers Track, where she combines creative practice with scholarly research on horror cinema, adaptation, moving-image analysis, and screenwriting. Her interdisciplinary work investigates the way stories transform across media and cultural contexts. In fall 2026, she will teach Remixed & Remade: Literature into Film at Washington University. As curator of the exhibition After the Image: Adaptation in Contemporary Art at the Kemper Museum, Thielecke brings her expertise in adaptation into the realm of visual art, examining how artists reinterpret, translate, and reimagine existing images and narratives. Alongside her directing career, she teaches camera acting workshops in Germany and literature courses at the women's prison in Vandalia, Missouri. Her plays Follow the… (2024) and The Winger (2026) received the A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Award.