Helke is an Associate Professor of Research; Head of Research and director of the Critical Cinema Lab at the department of Film, Television and Scenography. She is an award-winning filmmaker and theorist whose films (Ruthless Times - Songs of Care 2022, American Vagabond 2013, Playground 2010, Along the Road Little Child 2005, The Idle Ones 2001, White Sky 1998, Sin 1995) have received international recognition and have been screened in major international film festivals. Her artistic and practice-based research at the intersection of theory and praxis examines the interrelations of the poetics and politics of documentary cinema (e.g. hybrid forms, political performativity and post-political or emotive turns in creative documentary film) in dialogue with, for example, contemporary political philosophy and critical theory.