Carola Dertnig lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She has served as a Professor of Performative Art at the University of Fine Arts Vienna since 2006. Dertnig 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, Wien/Berlin; Solyanka Gallery, Moskau; REDCAT CalArts, LA; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Artists Space, New York; Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York; mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GFZK), Leipzig; Secession, Vienna.

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