HUGO TILLMANN
The Berliner Festspiele announced today that Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal will be the next director of the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin. On February 1, 2018, she will take the reins from Gereon Sievernich, the current director of the Festspiele’s exhibition hall for the past 16 years.
Since 2007, Rosenthal has been the chief curator of London’s Hayward Gallery. Prior to that, she was the modern and contemporary art curator of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Between 2014 and 2016, Rosenthal also concurrently served as the director of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, where she helped stage large-scale solo exhibitions for Pipilotti Rist, Ana Mendieta, and Lee Bul.
Rosenthal was chosen unanimously at a meeting of the Berliner Festspiele’s board of directors on March 8. In a press statement, Thomas Oberender, the director of Festspiele, said that as a curator, Rosenthal, “has built an international reputation and network, is interested in a broad spectrum of artistic topics and—as she has recently proved in her work for the Biennale of Sydney—thinks outside the box of artistic genres.”