Dr. Dorothea Schöne has been Artistic Director of the Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin since 2014. She studied art history, political science, sociology and philosophy at the University of Leipzig. From 2005 to 2006 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Riverside, and from 2006 to 2009 she worked at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) as a curatorial assistant for the exhibition “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures”, which was also shown in Nuremberg and Berlin in 2010. From 2010 to 2014, she worked as a freelance curator and art critic while also working on her dissertation. In 2015, she received her doctorate in art history for her thesis on the topic of post-war modernism in Berlin.

For her research, she received the Robert R. Rifkind Scholar-in-Residency Grant (2019), the Doina Popescu Postdoctoral Fellowship from Ryerson University Toronto (2015), the Getty Library Research Grant and a DAAD travel grant (2011). In 2012 she was a fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. and in 2018 guest curator at the HOW Art Museum in Shanghai. In 2021, she was awarded the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize, which honours research and exhibitions on persecuted and ostracised artists. In May 2024, she accepted an invitation from the Haugar Art Museum in Norway as Researcher in Residence and in August of the same year she was an Advisory Scholar at the invitation of Arenet (The Americas Research Network) in Puebla/Mexico.