Barbara Steiner
Austrian art historian and curator (born 1964)
Barbara Steiner (born 1964) is an Austrian art historian, curator, author, and editor. Steiner is the director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. She served as the director of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig from 2001 to 2011, and as the director of Kunsthaus Graz from 2016 to 2021.
Biography
Steiner was born in Dörfles, Austria, in 1964. She graduated from the Ortwein School in Graz in 1984, studied art history at the University of Vienna, and undertook post-graduate research in museum and curatorial studies at the State Academy for Lower Austria in Krems.
Career
Steiner began her curatorial career in Germany and Austria in the 1990s. She wrote the first text on the artist Erwin Wurm in 1990. Steiner organized the exhibition Backstage: Topology of Contemporary Art at Kunstverein Hamburg with Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen in 1993, and curated Lost Paradise at Kunstraum Vienna in 1994, exhibiting works by Jeremy Deller, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Lost Paradise was revisited for its importance in an exhibition and publication titled theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim in 2008. In the late 1990s, Steiner headed art associations in Ludwigsburg and Wolfsburg, working with artists such as Angela Bulloch, Ólafur Elíasson, Liam Gillick, Karen Kilimnik, and Philippe Parreno.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q95206216. The first chronological checks are 1964, 2001, 2011 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara Steiner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.