Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal

Stephanie Rosenthal was Director of the Gropius Bau from 2018 to 2022. Prior to her tenure in Berlin, she worked as Chief Curator of London’s Hayward Gallery from 2007 to 2017, Curator at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and Artistic Director of the 20th Biennale of Sydney. In September 2022, she moved on to her new role as Director of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project.

During her time at the Gropius Bau, Rosenthal expanded existing institutional formats and firmly established the exhibition hall as a dynamic space for contemporary art and discourse. Drawing on the building’s history as a Museum and School of Decorative Arts, home to numerous artist studios and workshops, she once again turned the Gropius Bau into a living site of artistic creation and production. Anchoring the curatorial praxis within the institution, she founded the In House: Artist in Residence programme and exhibited internationally acclaimed artists like Lee Bul, Lee Mingwei, Yayoi Kusama and Dayanita Singh. Under her leadership, the Gropius Bau established a distinctive identity, evolving into one of the world’s most renowned exhibition venues.

Exhibitions she curated at the Gropius Bau include: Lee Bul: Crash (2018), Garden of Earthly Delights (2019), Wu Tsang: There is no nonviolent way to look at somebody (2019), Lee Mingwei: 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals (2020), Otobong Nkanga: There’s No Such Thing as Solid Ground (2020), and most recently Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective — A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe (2021), Hella Jongerius: Woven Cosmos (2021), Zheng Bo: Wanwu Council 萬物社 (2021), Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera (2022) and YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal (2022).

As of November 2022