We are extremely proud and honoured that Lund University have decided to grant Sisters Hope founder and artistic director Gry Worre Hallberg with an Honorary Doctorate.

An honorary doctorate, or Doctor honoris causa, is an academic degree given by a university to recognize highly siginificant contributions and achievements in a specific field. This prestigious award is conferred to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional scholarship, leadership, public service, or excellence in the arts, business, or other fields. Unlike a regular doctorate, it is not earned through academic study but is granted as a form of high honor and recognition.

Gry Worre Hallberg received the award at the doctoral convocation at Lund University on May 29, 2026.

Read the full news story from Lund University here.

Part of reason for appointment:

The performance artist Gry Worre Hallberg is the founder and artistic director of the international, Copenhagen-based award-winning performance art group Sisters Hope.

Sisters Hope has since it was founded in 2007 developed a unique performance art methodology, which has evolved into an entire poetic world, a poetic universe – a universe realized in a long series of artistic manifestations, in many different formats, always immersive, often largescale, often long-term, sometimes lasting years – all over the world. Besides numerous manifestations in Scandinavia, Sisters Hope has recently performed in Italy as international head piece for their cultural capital and through a long-term strategic collaboration with the Danish Cultural Institute, in China, Brazil, and Georgia.

Sisters Hope’s work is vision-based. It starts from a vision of a different, future society where the poetic and the sensuous have replaced economic rationality as society’s highest value and guiding principle – a society they call the Sensuous Society, the theoretical foundation of which Hallberg outlines in her artistic research doctoral dissertation.

From that vision, Sisters Hope ask concrete questions, such as ‘what will an educational system look like in a sensuous society’, and then goes on to create an entire school system, ‘Sisters Academy’, where they can explore that question hands-on, and have done so in many places and countries. Documented as Sisters Academy – Education for the Future.

What will a healthcare system look like in a Sensuous Society? The institutions of governance? What will it mean to inhabit a home in a Sensuous Society? Sisters Hope recently explored that question in a years-long manifestation now reenacted and exhibited at KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg alongside the permanent collection.

Most fundamentally, one question that runs like a red thread through all their work: What is selfhood, what is a self, in a Sensuous Society?

Sisters Hope often unfolds their manifestations inside existing societal institutions, like schools, governance buildings, or in the public cityscape, and so, their work reach far beyond ‘the artworld’ in a strict sense.

Thereby, they sound the depth of the aesthetic, and its potential, as, not a mere ornament to, but as the very foundation of societal life, of human and more-than-human community. This is serious work that society needs. Inspiring work, which society needs. I am not aware of anything in the artworld that really compares to Sisters Hope.