Ute Meta Bauer, Director and Associate Professor
MIT Visual Arts Program, Department of Architecture

Ute Meta Bauer, internationally known as a freelance curator and artistic director, as well as as a teacher, lecturer and editor, has been appointed director of the Visual Arts Program in the Department of Architecture.

Born in Germany and educated as an artist at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg), she received her Diploma with honors in Visual Communication/Stage Design in 1987. She has been working ever since as a curator for exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film and video, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. She has also served as a director for various institutions and as advisor for a number of high-profile cultural boards.

From 1990-1994 she was Artistic Director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, where she edited the international art magazine META and conceived and realized exhibitions, symposia, workshops and lectures by artists and theorists.

From 1996 to the present, she has held an appointment at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as Professor of Theory, Practice and Transfer of Contemporary Art. During that time she has also served as head of the Institute of Contemporary Art (1996-2001) and as head of the Institute for Art and Cultural Science (2003-2004). In 2002-2003 she held the position of the vice rector and has been in charge of the international affairs of the academy. Since 2002, she has also been founding director of the Norwegian Office for Contemporary Art, Oslo, a private foundation founded by the Ministry of Culture and Church and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop collaborations in contemporary art between Norway and the international art scene.

In recent years, she has curated several events and exhibitions, including Architectures of Discourse (Barcelona, 2001), First Story?Women Building/New Narratives for the 21st Century for the European Cultural Capital Porto 2001, and the Artist-in-Residence Program at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas (2004). Between 1999 and 2002, with Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor, she was co-curator of Documenta11, an exhibition that takes place every five years and enjoys a reputation for providing the broadest overview of contemporary art worldwide. Its five thematic platforms took place at various sites such as Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia and Lagos and involved more than 200 artists, filmmakers and speakers in various fields. In Kassel alone, it attracted more than 650,000 visitors during its 100 days. In the spring of 2004, Bauer was also artistic director of the 3rd berlin biennial for contemporary art, a broad international spectrum of visual, urban, cinematic, performative and sonic stagings that took place over the course of two months. Created to a large extent on site, the event drew 60,000 visitors and attracted intense international and national media interest. A catalogue of the event has been published with over 300 photographs of the artists' work and ten new essays on Berlin.