User:Christopher Lee Adams/sandbox/Barbara Steiner

Barbara Steiner (b. 1964) is an Austrian art historian, curator, author, and editor. Since 2016, Steiner has been director of Kunsthaus Graz. She is based in Graz, Austria and Leipzig, Germany.

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.

Steiner served as the director of the Leipzig Museum of Contemporary Art (GfZK) from 2001 to 2011. She modernized the museum's role as a cultural institution, and improved the former East German city's standing in the international art scene. Steiner exhibited both emerging and established artists such as Jun Yang and Deimantas Narkevičius, as well as Rosemarie Trockel, Sarah Morris, Ólafur Elíasson, Jorge Pardo, and Neo Rauch.

Steiner's most controversial program during her tenure at GfZK was Carte Blanche (2008–2010). She invited eleven companies, private collectors, and commercial galleries to curate and fund their own exhibitions at the museum, sparking a debate over the competing influences of private interest and public trust in contemporary art.

In 2012, Steiner took over as the artistic director of Europe (to the power of) n, a transnational project in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, which produced exhibitions in multiple cities in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, China, and Taiwan. Steiner organized a series of exhibitions in Austria titled Friends and Accomplices at Vienna Künstlerhaus (2014), the Austrian Association of Women Artists (2015), and Vienna Secession (2016).

In 2016, Steiner was named director of Kunsthaus Graz,  reorganizing the museum space together with artists and artists groups, such as Niels Jonkhans, Oliver Klimpel, Topotek 1, and Superflex. Steiner exhibited Jun Yang in 2019, and Haegue Yang in 2017 and 2020.