Kai Hinrich Müller conducts research, curates and educates at the intersection of music history, the culture of remembrance and artistic practice. His work regularly takes him to festivals, cultural and research institutions across Europe and the USA. His research focuses on the reconstruction of unknown and forgotten musical histories, the history and present-day situation of ostracised music, the cultural repercussions of persecution and exile, and questions of historical and contemporary performance practice. Müller has received grants from various foundations, was a Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles in 2023/24, and, following his PhD and habilitation, teaches at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. In the winter semester of 2026/27, he will become Academic Director of the Centre for Ostracised Music at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre.

His current artistic partners include Klaus Mäkelä, Kent Nagano, Aurel Dawidiuk, the Vienna Musikverein and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. His projects include, amongst others, the transatlantic series »Opera & Democracy« in collaboration with the Thomas Mann House, the »Bauhaus Music« series at the Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, and the Terezín Music Academy in the former Theresienstadt ghetto. The latter is an initiative of the »Musica non grata« project run by the Prague State Opera and the German Embassy in Prague, for which he has curated numerous programmes on artists persecuted by the Nazis.

In addition, he is a co-initiator of various projects focusing on historically informed performances of Richard Wagner’s operas, including »Wagner-Lesarten« and »The Wagner Cycles«, in collaboration with Kent Nagano, Jan Vogler, the Dresden Festival Orchestra and Concerto Köln. He has also carried out projects with, amongst others, the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, the Bavarian State Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the German Historical Museum in Berlin, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, 1014 – space for ideas, the Goethe-Institut, the Bayreuth Festival, the International May Festival in Wiesbaden, the International Handel Festival in Göttingen, as well as with WDR and NDR.

His publications include Wiederentdeckung und Protest. Alte Musik im kulturellen Gedächtnis (2013), Wagner-Lesarten (2022), It’s a man’s world? Künstlerinnen in Europas Musikmetropolen des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (2023) and Musikerinnen und Musiker im Umfeld des Bauhauses (2025). He is currently working on a compendium on musical life in the Theresienstadt ghetto.