[8][9][10] With the support of a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Milev traveled to Japan, where she became conducted ethnographic studies and trained in the traditional Japanese martial arts Kyudō und Aikidō in Kyōto.
In 2008, Milev earned a doctorate with a dissertation in the field of political philosophy, evaluated by Peter Sloterdijk and Elisabeth von Samsonow (2nd reader) and awarded the summa cum laude honor.
In 2014, she received Habilitation with a thesis on the topic of political design sociology, mentored by Franz Schultheis and refereed by Sigrid Schade, Oliver Marchart, and Ulf Wuggenig.
In 2017 she initiated the research project De-Coupled Society: Liberalization and Resistance in East Germany since 1989/90, which has appeared in multiple volumes with Peter Lang since 2018.
In the serial multimedia productions on the theme Horror Vacui, such as In Aspik, Einneonopern, Second Up, and Eine Messe, Milev worked in opera-like jam sessions with the musicians Bo Kondren (Ornament & Verbrechen), Paul Landers and Christian Lorenz (both members of Feeling B at the time, and now in Rammstein), André Greiner-Pol (Freygang), Taymur Streng (9 Tage alt), along with the poet Johannes Jansen and the performer Matthias Baader Holst.
Films such as raster+psyche and irreversible were accompanied by live sounds, and mounted as concert-like performances in the context of different events, including in such venues as the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, the Exhibition Center at Fučíkplatz, the House of Young Talents in Berlin (today: Podewil), and the Lindenpark in Potsdam.
[24][25] "The displacement of cultural spaces—in particular in Germany after the 1989 transition—is a topic that she also presented in 1997 at Documenta, to which she was invited by Catherine David as the first woman artist from a former Eastern bloc country.
She calls the installation shown in the Ottoneum Projection Forum III: hanging from the ceiling, a rotating projector in a black housing casts slides of construction sites on the wall.
Work clusters emerge such as Body Dwellings, Me Myself & I – Release Your True Image, and The Storytellers Return, all collaborations with the photographer Philipp Beckert.
Here too, Milev integrates citations from the martial arts, the Zen-Mondo, or the Japanese expressive dance Butoh, combined with fragments taken from pop culture.
For Milev, the black box is an identity-construct that develops itself in the realm of the individual "microtopos" and retreats before the external world in response to a social intervention, a devaluation, or a stigmatization.
(Association of Black Box Multiple Environments), also known as the Institute for Applied Spatial Research and Microtopic Cultural Production: a project she had already begun in 1987 as a self-reflection and individual self-positioning by an artist not only on the art market, but in the social system as such.
[40] A further transformational phase of Milev's artistic research occurs during her ethnographic studies and training in the martial arts of Kyudō und Aikidō in Japan.
In the discipline of Kata (stylized or choreographed movement sequences) and in the philosophy of Maai (distance), Milev discerns the key to a complementary ordering of perception.
At the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2005, she founded Emergency Design, a research discourse thematizing the political, social, spatial, and aesthetic dimensions of survival.
[50][51] The basis for Milev's discourse on Emergency Design lies in her experiences with the collapse of the GDR and the Eastern Bloc and the subsequent upheavals of the early 1990s.
(Seth Howes, Film Experiments, Design Anthropology, and the Politics of Vision: Yana Milev's Theory of Practice, in: Id., Moving Images on the Margins.
In the continuation of her scholarly activity as research associate of the Seminar for Sociology at the University of St. Gallen (SfS-HSG), Milev further develops the themes of the precaritization and symbolic violence of neoliberal regimes.
Milev furthermore analyzes the pathogenic effects of coordinated brand movements in the social fields, as well as social-ethical disorientation, deprivation, and associated comorbidities.
A public-facing high point of this research is her lecture at the scholarly symposium "Experiencing Atmospheres: Dimensions of a Diffuse Phenomenon," held at the ZKM in 2011[57] and her written contribution to the Handbook of Fear published by J.B. Metzler in 2013.
This comprises an edition of multiple volumes with the titles Annexation, Reorganization, Exile, Surveys over social facts, Testimonies in Photography & Film, Spaces, Scenes, and Which Future?
Milev's first roles in context-oriented project leadership were undertaken between 1988 and 1991 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and in the Black Box Multiple studio in Dresden-Nord.
With the international symposium "Emergency Design," which took place as a festival and conference at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2006, Milev established her specific profile as a curator.
[78][79] At the University of Design Karlsruhe (HfG), curatorial programs and platforms including talk(ing) space (2006)[80][81] and Guerilla Transit (2007)[82] were developed.
The same year, Milev presented a sketch of applied crisis-economics in the Anthropocene during the epilogue of the GLOBALE, held at the ZKM Karlsruhe on the topic "Next Society — Facing Gaia.
The will for reform felt by the majority of the GDR population in 1989/90, with its goal of a grassroots-democratic, confederalist constitutional solution, was forced to give way to an annexation whose consequences damaged the rights and values of many millions of people.
(Michael Meyen, Der Think Tank Yana Milev, Das mediale Erbe der DDR, URL: https://medienerbe.hypotheses.org/2459) In protest against the erasure in international law of her country of origin, the GDR, and her involuntary inclusion as a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 2000 Milev declared Switzerland her place of exile from political and territorial homelessness.