ACT Founding Director, Ute Meta Bauer, was conferred with the 2025 Honorary Doctorate of Art and Design by Aalto University in Finland
Ute Meta Bauer, Full Professor, Nanyang Technological University & Principle Research Fellow, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
Ute Meta Bauer is a Curator working across contemporary art, film, video and sound. As Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, she initiated and co-chaired the Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practice and currently is the Principle Research Fellow at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, the first national research centre in the arts, which she led as Founding Director for over a decade. A career spanning three decades, her focus has been on the relationship of place, labor, capital and on climates, habitats and environments.
Her academic roles include Dean of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London, Associate Professor at MIT, where she founded the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology and as Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she was Head of the Institute of Contemporary Art, and later Vice-Rector for International Relations. She has curated and co-curated the 3rd Berlin Biennale, Documenta11, the US Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, and the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, was Artistic Director of the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and in 2022 co-curated the 17th Istanbul Biennial with David Teh and Amar Kanwar.
As the Founding Director of OCA Norway, she was commissioner for the Nordic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. Having worked with Finnish artists, including Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Laura Beloff, Pia Lindman, Mika Taanila, Mika Vainio, she is, since 2018, a member of the Advisory Board of Contemporary Art Commissioning Agency IHME, Helsinki.
