Hanna is a Research Professor and Principal Investigator at the Bern University of Applied Sciences—Academy of the Arts, where she leads two interdisciplinary research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is also an Honorary Fellow in the Department of History of Art at University College London (UCL). Prior to her current roles, Hanna was an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at UCL, where she specialized in the History of Art, Media and Technology. She also served as a Mellon Visiting Professor for Cultures of Conservation at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. She has also held the position of Head of Conservation at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Hanna obtained her doctorate from the University of Amsterdam, Institute of Art History and Cultural Studies and Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (2013).
Hanna’s research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2019-ongoing), Terra Foundation for American Art (2019-20), the Getty Foundation (2016-17), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2013-15) and Dutch Research Council (2009-13). At UCL, she received UCL Global Engagement Funding to develop a research collaboration with Brazilian universities (2019-21), a Dean’s Strategic Fund Grant for Education and Research Activities at the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences (2019), and has developed and supervised a UCL Laidlaw Scholarship project (2019-2020) in order to further expand The Cabinet of Obsolete Technologies. Founded in 2017 as a research and teaching collection at the Department of History of Art, The Cabinet of Obsolete Technologies entails technologies of the still and moving image and aims to facilitate object-based learning on undergraduate and postgraduate level.