Barbara Steiner has been a board member and director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation since September 2021.
After leading positions at art institutions, including the Foundation Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig and the Kunsthaus Graz, and teaching at universities, including the University of Art and Design Linz, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Steiner took over the management of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. In her theoretical and practical work, she deals with structural and institutional issues as well as the framework conditions of cultural production.
In addition to artist monographs, Steiner has published a series of thematic books on (public and private) museums, curatorship, institutional politics/economies and relational spatial concepts in the visual arts, architecture and urban planning. She studied art history and political science at the University of Vienna. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the ideology of the white exhibition space.
Steiner is a jury member for the City of Leipzig Architecture Prize (since 2005), a member of the AK Vienna Art Advisory Board (since 2018) and a regular judge for art in architecture competitions (including the German Bundestag, Brandenburg State Parliament, Humboldt Forum Berlin). Between 2010 and 2015 she was a university councilor at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, today she is a university councilor at Graz University of Technology.
