Carola Dertnig lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She has served as professor of performative art at the University of Fine Arts Vienna since 2006. She took part in the 1997 Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and taught as a visiting professor at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles. Dertnig’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the State Gallery of Lower Austria, Krems; Galerie CRONE, Vienna/Berlin; Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna; the Solyanka Gallery, Moscow; the REDCAT CalArts Theater, Los Angeles; the MoMA PS1, New York; Artists Space, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; and the Secession, Vienna. In 2024 her work is represented in a midcareer exhibition Dancing through Life in OK_Linz including a publication. In 2013 she received the Austrian Art Award.

In 2005, Dertnig published the book Let’s Twist Again: If You Can’t Think It, Dance It, a study of the local history of performance in Vienna from 1960 to the present (coedited with Stefanie Seibold). From 2009 to 2011, she participated in the research project Troubling Research: Performing Knowledge in the Arts, and published her own book Perform Perform Perform (2011). Performing the Sentence: Views on Research and Teaching in Performative Fine Arts, which she coedited with Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, published in 2014.