PhD Candidate Kuluk Helms

Kuluk Helms is a Greenlandic/Inuk performing artist, culture bearer, maskedancer, poet and researcher. She holds a Master’s degree in Arts and was a PhD researcher at CEARC, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Her work brings together artistic practice and research around cultural belonging, Indigenous epistemologies, decolonisation and the ways in which cultural practices shape individual and collective narratives. Her artistic work has explored, in particular, the experience of moving between Greenlandic and Danish cultural worlds and the complex question of belonging.

Within PREFER, Kuluk played an important role in the Greenlandic fieldwork, bringing an embodied and culturally grounded perspective to questions of terminal situations, existential risk and cultural continuity. Her contribution was particularly important in opening space for forms of knowledge and expression that do not fit easily within conventional academic categories. This included attention to performance, storytelling and cultural practices, and to the ways in which the continuity or loss of culture can affect how people understand themselves and their futures. Her research explicitly connects these questions with Indigenous epistemologies and existential risk.

Her experience as a culture bearer and performer also contributed to PREFER’s broader interest in narrative as more than a means of collecting data: as a way of articulating experience, transmitting knowledge and making possible different accounts of what is at stake. She brought this perspective into dialogue with the ethnographic and environmental research conducted in Kalaallit Nunaat.

Kuluk left the PREFER project in July 2026. Her contribution remains an important part of the project’s Greenlandic fieldwork and its exploration of cultural continuity, narrative and Indigenous ways of understanding profound change.