Daughter of the painter AMI (Anne-Marie Imhoof) and of a passionate philhellene (Rodolphe Imhoof), Barbara Polla grew up in Geneva and spent a year in Greece at the age of 17. This year spent abroad represented her first contact with a dictatorship and prison. She has four children and was divorced in 2013. Barbara Polla studied in Geneva where she obtained a degree with a specialization in inner
medicine, pneumology and immunoallergology. She then conducted research at
Harvard Medical School (HMS),
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in
Boston. In 1989, she took the helm of the unit of study of allergies at the Cantonal Hospital in
Geneva. From 1993 to 2000, she worked as research director of the
French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, focusing on stress proteins (HSP) and oxygen free radicals. She is the author and co-author of hundreds of research articles published in various reviews such as
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA,
The Journal of Clinical Investigation, and
The American Journal of Physiology. In 1991, Polla got involved in politics: first as member of the
Geneva City Council, then as canton depute of Geneva from 1993 to 1999 and finally as member of the
National Parliament from 1999 to 2003. She left the Liberal Party of Geneva in 2007. Since 1991, she has been developing her activity of
gallery owner in Geneva. International program dedicated to
contemporary artists, interest in every field that art explores and in every artistic media, multiple collaborations with art critics and curators, many publications, are some of the characteristics of Analix Forever. Polla has been curating exhibitions in Paris and elsewhere since 2011. In 2008, Polla initiated a long-term collaboration with
Paul Ardenne (exhibitions, conferences, books). She was associate curator for the exhibition "Motopoetics" (MAC Lyon, 2014) and for "Human Economy" presented at HEC Paris (2014, 2015). In 2015, Polla and Paul Ardenne were the co-curators of a two-part exhibition of
Shaun Gladwell across two sites in Sydney: UNSW Galleries and SCAF (Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation). She teaches on the links between art and fashion at the
Institut Français de la Mode (IFM) in Paris and at the HEAD (Haute Ecole d'art et de Design) in Geneva. She organizes monthly seminars in Geneva on the theme of creativity and is also a creative and critical writing professor at the HEAD. Polla is a writer and a columnist for newspapers such as Les Quotidiennes (La
Tribune de Genève, 24 heures), Agefi, (Switzerland), Citizen K, Nuke, Blast, Bariqaldana (Kuwait), CRASH, DROME, ART And, Roots & Routes, and Kunst Magazine. Since 2020 she is regularly writing for
Womentoday.fr She cofounded and edited the magazine Londerzeel and has created, in 2013, with the support of HEAD Geneva, the first issue of Critical Fashion Review. She also founded the Swiss Organization for emotional architecture and is the originator of the first international conference about emotional Architecture that took place in January 2011 in Geneva. Polla commits herself to freedom at various levels: as national counsellor, she fought for freedom of research, for the right to abort and to the pre-implantation diagnosis. The final voting about this subject occurred in Switzerland on June 14, 2015. Since 2017, Barbara Polla had worked on a cultural, artistic and social project aiming to install art by the UK artist Robert Montgomery in the public space of
Perama, a city near Athens in Greece where she lived as a teenager. The project also includes a pedagogic program with scholars from Perama, a collaboration with the
Athens School of Fine Arts, films, publications and theater plays to be presented in the open air Mikis Theodorakis Theater of Perama. == Politics ==