Cynthia Montier is an artist and researcher working between Strasbourg and Rome. She graduated in 2019 with a Master’s degree in research-creation in visual arts and social anthropology from the Université de Strasbourg and the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. In 2020, she also completed the CFPI (Training Program for Artist-Interveners) at the Haute École des Arts du Rhin, where she currently teaches.

Her work reflects a strong engagement with public space and a sustained interest in groups, collective bodies, and communities. Drawing from social anthropology and feminist pedagogies, she develops a practice situated between co-creation and intervention, combining ritual, communal, performative, and somatic approaches.

She is interested in collective memory, intentional forms of expression, and symbolic appropriations that emerge from social commitment or forms of devotion, often oriented toward questions of justice. Notions of belonging, friendship, belief, attachment, connection, and struggle run throughout her projects.

Influenced by the stories, practices, affects, and objects that arise from her encounters, Cynthia Montier creates relational spaces and understands art as a channel to explore the invisible, the immaterial, and affect. Echoing historical forms and those emerging from social movements, she develops a wide range of participatory formats and dispositifs — from interviews to workshops, from investigations to performances, from ritual to demonstration, from votive archives to speaking objects — mobilizing speech, gesture, and affective archives as supports for intuition and shared experience.

Since 2019, she has formed a duo with Ophélie Naessens exploring the notion of mineral sociality and ritual pedagogies through the prism of dialogic forms, investigations and performances navigating between pedagogy, activism and stone rituals. Together with Sophie Prinssen, she runs the « Activismes Ésotériques – Magie – Performance – Résistance » project (since 2021): a « research coven », a ritual and activist working group that gives rise to times of research and performances in the public space, to which the nineteenth issue of the journal Proteus devotes an article in the dedicated issue: « Le rituel dans l’art ». Her work has been shown at the Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel), the Institut d’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne, the 49° Nord 6° Est Frac Lorraine (Metz), the Magasin des Horizons (Grenoble), the Printemps de Septembre (Toulouse), the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg and internationally at AQB (Budapest), the Japanisches Palais (Dresden), the Centre of Gravity (Bristol), the Kleine Humboldt Galerie (Berlin) as well as the Richter (Moscow), the Royal Holloway School (London), the National Ethnographic Museum of Romania ASTRA Museul (Sibiu), and the research centre for contemporary art IUNO (Rome).

In 2021, Cynthia Montier will receive support from the DRAC Grand- Est for the production of the work karma with Abdul-Hadi Yasuev. Her works and protocols are part of the collections of the Magasin des Horizons, the Frac PACA, the Artothèque de Strasbourg and the IAC Villeurbanne.