James Gregory Atkinson is a German-American artist and curator. Atkinson earned a degree in Photography and Design from Lette-Verein, Berlin, studied at The Cooper Union School of Art, New York, and holds a Meisterschüler degree from Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main. He completed an artist residency at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles (2016) and was a participant in the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands (2017). Since being awarded a studio grant by the Cultural Foundation of Hesse (2018-2019), Atkinson lives and works between Frankfurt/Main and Seattle. Recent exhibitions include Rawr Means I Love You in Dinosaur curated by Daisy Sanchez at Lubov, New York; Show Me Your Shelves! presented by C& at the Detroit Public Library; and Re: Re: Black Macho. Unleash the Queen at PPC Contemporary in Frankfurt/Main.
Martin Beck is a New York-based artist whose works often draw from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. Beck’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway; Frac Lorraine, Metz, France; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; The Kitchen, New York; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge; as well as at 47 Canal, New York. Beck participated in the 10th Shanghai Biennale, the 29th São Paulo Bienal (with Julie Ault), and the 4th Bucharest Biennale. His publications include About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, The Aspen Complex, Last Night, An Organized Systems of Instructions, and rumors and murmurs.
Wenzel Bilger is Director of the Goethe-Institut in Bogotá, Colombia. Trained in Cultural Studies, American Studies, and Sociology, his interests revolve around the planetary interrelatedness of aesthetics, art, politics, and “nature.” At the Goethe-Institut, he develops transdisciplinary programs with a specific focus on art and aesthetics within their social and political contexts. From 2011-17, Bilger was Program Director at the Goethe-Institut New York, where he coordinated the cultural activities of the Goethe-Institut in North America.
Eva Birkenstock is the director of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. She was artistic co-director of Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (through 2010), curator at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2010-2016), and curator of the performance project of LISTE Art Fair Basel (2015-2018). Eva curated exhibitions and performance projects with artists including Kasia Fudakowski, Nicholas Grafia & Mikołaj Sobczak, Ulrike Müller, Phantom Kino Ballett, Josef Strau, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, and siren eun young jung. She is editor of the publications Ei Arakawa: Performance People (Winter 2020), Alicia Frankovich: OUTSIDE BEFORE BEYOND (2020), Art and Ideology Critique After 1989 (2014, with Max Hinderer Cruz, Jens Kastner, Ruth Sonderegger), and KAYA (2016), among others. Together with Manuela Ammer, Jenny Nachtigall, Kerstin Stakemeier, and Stephanie Weber, she initiated the magazine project Class Languages (since 2017). Eva Birkenstock was the 2014 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38.
Kari Conte is a curator and writer focused on global contemporary art. She is a 2020-21 Fulbright Senior Researcher in Istanbul. From 2010-20 she held the position of Director of Programs and Exhibitions at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, where she is currently Senior Advisor. Conte is Residency Curator for Kai Art Center in Tallinn, Advisor for the 2021 Helsinki Biennale and co-founder of Rethinking Residencies. She has curated more than forty exhibitions; these include recent solo presentations by Sonia Leimer, Chiara Fumai, Hikaru Fujii, Jennifer Tee, Eva Kot’átková and the group exhibitions Concrete Truth: Art and the Documentary, The Animal Mirror, and Aqueous Earth. She published Seven Work Ballets (Sternberg Press, 2016), the first monograph on artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and has contributed to numerous other books and exhibition catalogues.
Sarah Demeuse is an editor, communication strategist, and writer who occasionally makes exhibitions. In 2010, she founded curatorial office Rivet with Manuela Moscoso. Sarah has independently worked on a variety of exhibition and mediation projects in Argentina, Brasil, Mexico, Spain, and the USA. Sarah is the instigator of podcast dos-dos.org and has edited monographs of artists Ariel Schlesinger and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané. She has taught the Exhibition Making Practicum at the Master in Curatorial Practice Program at SVA and a studio-seminar at Barnard College about writing and graphic design. She is currently strategist-at-large at graphic design studio Wkshps.
Saim Demircan is a curator and writer based in New York. From 2012-15 he was a curator at Kunstverein Munich. Previously, he curated a two-year program of offsite projects, as well as an exhibition of works by German artist Kai Althoff at Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea. He has curated exhibitions in London, Vienna, Venice and at Fridericianum in Kassel. Saim has published on numerous artistic practices; his writing regularly appears in periodicals such as frieze and Texte zur Kunst. He is currently a Curator-at-Large at Aspen Art Museum. Saim Demircan was the 2017 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38.
Silvia Fehrmann is a literary scholar, translator, and cultural manager. Since 2018, she is director of DAAD’s Artists-in-Berlin Program, one of the world’s most renowned scholarship programs for artists working in the visual arts, literature, music, and film. Fehrmann was previously Deputy Director and Head of Communication and Education Programs at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), a venue for contemporary arts and a forum for public discourse. She is co-spokesperson of Rat für die Künste Berlin, a commission representing the city’s cultural practitioners, as well as Arbeitskreis Deutscher Internationaler Residenzprogramme, a working group of Germany’s international residency programs. Silvia was born in Buenos Aires, where she worked at the Goethe-Institut and taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA).
Avi Feldman (born in Montréal) is a curator and writer based in Berlin and Dresden. Feldman holds a law degree and has been a member of the Israeli Bar since 2005. He holds a PhD in Practice in Curating from the Department of Art at the University of Reading in cooperation with Zurich University of the Arts (PhD thesis After the Law: Towards Judicial-Visual Activism, 2018). In the context of his thesis research, Feldman organized Playing Hide and Law at tranzit, Bratislava (2017), and the exhibition, workshop, and performance series Motions for the Agenda at Artport Tel Aviv (2017). Since 2019, he has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, as well as researching questions of law and art in China. Avi Feldman was the 2018 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38. All exhibitions, events, and projects carried out at Ludlow 38 in 2018 were organized by the Agency for Legal Imagination, which was conceived and initiated by Feldman. The Agency is an independent organization devoted to the investigation of existing and imagined relations between legal and artistic imagination, and visual and legal activism.
Larissa Harris is a curator at the Queens Museum, where she has organized a variety of exhibitions such as Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center with Damon Rich (2009); a new commission by Pedro Reyes, The People’s United Nations (pUN) (2013); and a thirty-year retrospective of Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) (2014). She co-organized 13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair with Nicholas Chambers (2014) and, with Patti Phillips, the first survey of the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles (2016). 2020 projects include After the Plaster Foundation, or, “Where can we Live?” and a new commission with Ulrike Müller, The Conference of the Animals. Harris served on the Ludlow 38 jury from 2011-18.
Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, curator, writer, and teacher based in Berlin and New York. He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design practice; is artistic director of FRONT International 2022, the Cleveland triennial of contemporary art; and organizes Commune, an emergent, multiform workshop that practices artistic tools for social transformation. Previously, Prem founded the experimental gallery P! and the design studio Project Projects in New York. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. In 2019, his professional papers from 1997–2017 were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies. Prem’s experimental, ever-changing, electronic book, P!DF, is available online.
Tobi Maier is a curator, writer, and the director of the Municipal Galleries in Lisbon. Previously he organized the exhibition space SOLO SHOWS in São Paulo (2015-2018), worked as an associate curator for the thirtieth edition of the Bienal de São Paulo (2012), and as a curator at Ludlow 38 (2008–2011) and at Frankfurter Kunstverein (2006–2008). He holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London and completed PhD research in the department of Poéticas Visuais at the Escola de Comunicações e Artes, Universidade de São Paulo. He has contributed to a variety of journals including Artforum, ArtReview, Flash Art, Frieze, OEI, Texte zur Kunst, and lectures frequently. Tobi Maier was the 2011 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38.
Clara Meister is a curator based in Berlin with a particular interest in language and music. She is currently the Associate Curator, Director’s Office at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, where she co-curated the group exhibition Garden of Earthly Delights and a solo exhibition with Otobong Nkanga. She curated the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany of Camille Henrot at Schinkel Pavillon and was a project curator for the Marrakech Biennale MB5. Clara programmed Ballads of the Beasts in the framework of Jeunes Commissaires of the Bureau des arts plastiques, Institut français d’Allemagne. She was awarded a Graham Foundation project grant for Center for Optimism, her collaboration with Sam Chermayeff. Clara is a co-founder of Soundfair, an exhibition collective whose purpose is to re-contextualize music by exhibiting music as art. She is also a co-founder and editor of the journal …ment and has contributed to various exhibition catalogs and art journals. Clara obtained a PhD degree from HFBK Hamburg on the topic of voice and utterance in art. Clara Meister was the 2012 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38.
Christian Rattemeyer is an independent writer and curator, and has served as Executive Director of SculptureCenter from 2019-20 and Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2007-19. At MoMA, Rattemeyer curated and co-curated nine exhibitions, including SURROUNDS: 11 Installations (2019); Transmissions: Art from Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960-1980 (2015); Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan (2012); and Compass in Hand (2009). Previously, Rattemeyer worked as Curator at Artists Space (2003-2007) and worked for Documenta11 (2002), Documenta X (1997), and Documenta IX (1992) in Kassel, his hometown. Rattemeyer served on the Ludlow 38 jury from 2011-18.
David Reinfurt is an independent graphic designer (BA, 1993, University of North Carolina; MFA, 1999, Yale University). He worked at IDEO from 1995 to 1997. In 2000 he formed O-R-G inc. In 2006, with Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, he established Dexter Sinister. From 2006 to 2011 Dexter Sinister published Dot Dot Dot. In 2011 with Bertolotti-Bailey and Angie Keefer, he founded The Serving Library. David teaches at Princeton, was 2010 USA Rockefeller Design Fellow, and his work is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Centres Georges Pompidou, and Whitney Museum. David was 2016-2017 design fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Ken Saylor is the founding principal of Studio Ken Saylor, a New York City-based architecture, art and design consultancy. He has designed numerous galleries, lofts, and showrooms, and has staged multi-media installations, civic engagements and large-scale exhibitions with visual artists, curators, and museums internationally. His work has been published in Progressive Architecture, Interior Design, Metropolis, Art in America, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, The Architect’s Newspaper, and The New York Times. A graduate of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study Program, he has lectured and participated in symposia at Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Cooper Hewitt Museum, American Institute of Architects, American Association of Museums, Princeton School of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Pratt Institute, and Dia Art Foundation. Saylor’s recent large scale exhibition projects include: By All Means / Itziar Barrio, Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao, Spain 2019); A Portrait of a People, Chaldean Cultural Center (Detroit, 2018); to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer, mumok | museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien (Vienna, 2015); As it were... So to speak, The Jewish Museum (New York, 2013).
Nicolaus Schafhausen is a curator, director, author, and editor of numerous publications on contemporary art. Since 2011 he has been the Strategic Director of Fogo Island Arts, Canada, an initiative of Shorefast, a charitable foundation dedicated to finding alternative solutions for the revitalisation of areas prone to emigration. He is the Artistic Director of Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, an exhibition at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism about the future of the past, on view from November 2019 through October 2020. Schafhausen has led institutions such as the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Witte de With Center Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. He was Founding Director of European Kunsthalle, a project to examine the conditions and structures of publicly funded contemporary arts organizations beyond local government mandates. In 2019, for political reasons, Schafhausen stepped down as Director of the Kunsthalle Wien, a position he had held since 2012, stating that the future of such institutions was thrown into question by rising nationalist policies in Austria and elsewhere. He has called for stronger support for the arts from independent government and cultural agencies in times of right-wing populist movements. In the future Schafhausen plans to work beyond the boundaries of conventional institutions. Schafhausen served on the Ludlow 38 jury in 2012 and from 2014-18.
Jakob Schillinger is a curator and art historian. He was the dean of the School for Worldly Companions at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel and co-curator of the survey exhibition based in Berlin. He has written about art and media technology for journals including October, Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, and May, and contributed an essay on Martin Kippenberger’s service economy to the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition at Kunsthalle Bonn. He is a PhD candidate in art history at Princeton University. Jakob Schillinger was the 2013 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38.
Karin Schneider is a Brazil-born and New York-based artist and filmmaker. In 1997, Schneider co-founded Union Gaucha Productions (UGP), an artist-run, experimental film company designed to carry out interdisciplinary collaborations with practitioners from different fields. From 2005-08, she was a founding member of Orchard, a cooperatively organized exhibition and social space in New York’s Lower East Side. From 2010-14, Schneider co-founded Cage, a space that facilitated new kinds of social interactions. Her current work, Situational Diagrams, was the subject of a book and an exhibition at Dominique Lévy Gallery in 2016. Since 2018, she works with a group of people to create ORTVI.
Sara Stevenson is the Executive Director of the German Film Office, a New York-based initiative of the Goethe-Institut and German Films. From 2011-20, she wore two hats at the Goethe-Institut New York: as Program Curator, she organized and coordinated arts and film programs; as Residency Program Director, she was responsible for everything Ludlow 38, including the selection process and the liaison between the curators and the Goethe-Institut. A film enthusiast with an interest in radical politics, Sara most recently organized Female Misbehavior: The Films of Monika Treut & Elfi Mikesch with Anthology Film Archives and the film and talk series Black Solidarity in a Global Context with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Simone Subal founded Simone Subal Gallery in 2011. She is co-initiator of Condo New York.
Nina Tabassomi is the director of the TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol. From 2013-15 she served as curator at the Fridericianum in Kassel, where she was responsible for the exhibition program in the museum tower. From 2011-13, she worked as project manager at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, having previously contributed to the survey exhibition based in Berlin as curatorial assistant. Nina’s writing has appeared in various exhibition catalogs. Nina Tabassomi was the 2016 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38.
Vivien Trommer is an independent curator and writer based in Frankfurt/Main. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Cologne as well as degrees in Curatorial Studies from Städelschule and Goethe University Frankfurt, and in Art History and Gender Studies from Humboldt University Berlin. Vivien has lectured at Dusseldorf Art Academy, and guest lectured in Frankfurt/Main, Cambridge, and Washington DC. In 2016, she was Kadist Curatorial Fellow and co-curated House of Commons at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main. Prior to her residency at Ludlow 38, she worked as curatorial assistant at Kunsthalle Wien and curated the exhibition Experience Economy at Salzburger Kunstverein. Vivien is a frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues and art magazines such as Artforum, Die Welt, Monopol, and KubaParis. Vivien Trommer was the 2015 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38.
Franziska Sophie Wildförster is a curator based in Vienna and Munich. She received an MA in Visual Cultures and an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths University, London. From 2013-16 she served as curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna. In 2016 she co-founded Kevin Space, an independent art space in Vienna, where she has presented exhibitions and performances with Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Lydia Ourahmane, Yuri Pattison, and Kandis Williams, among others. Franziska has co-edited and contributed to various publications, most notably Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest (Sternberg Press, 2014) and Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin: Aru Kuxipa (Sternberg Press, 2016). Franziska Sophie Wildförster was the 2019 Curatorial Resident at Ludlow 38.