Sabine Breitwieser is an international curator and museum director, currently based in Vienna, Austria, as independent scholar. In 2012, she received the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts in New York. Breitwieser was a 2020/2021 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, a prestigious research program she continued in 2022.
Breitwieser held important leading positions at museums. From 2013 until 2018 she was the Director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Previously, from 2010 until 2013 she served as Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and headed one of the six specialist departments and collections. From 1988 until 2007 she was the Founding Director and Chief Curator of the Generali Foundation in Vienna. As an independent and guest curator she organized exhibitions at institutions such as the Muzeum Susch in Switzerland, MoMA PS1 in New York, MMK Frankfurt, Germany, the Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), the Styrian Autumn Festival in Graz, and theLiverpool Biennial.
In addition to her roles as director and curator Breitwieser assumes numerous other professional functions. From 2004 until 2013, she served on the board of CIMAM, the International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern Art, the last three years as CIMAM’s Secretary and Treasurer. In this role, she co-organized the annual CIMAM-conferences around the globe, from New York to Sao Paulo and Shanghai. She is affiliated with further international professional organizations such as corresponding member of the Secession in Vienna. She was one of the three moderators of the Museum Policy Initiative 2007/08 of the then Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Art and Culture. Breitwieser is a regular jury member for numerous awards, stipends and the like. In 2015, Okwui Enwezor appointed her to the jury for the award of the 56th Venice Biennale.
Sabine Breitwieser has published numerous essays on contemporary art and museum management in exhibition catalogues and books. She is a contributor to art magazines such as Afterall (London), Artforum (New York) and Texte zur Kunst (Berlin). She lectures frequently at universities and has participated in a large number of conferences and symposia. In 2012 she was the Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley in the United States.
She organized and directed more than 150 monographic and thematic exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States and edited and published about 100 catalogues and books. Many of her projects toured to prominent museums and some of them are now considered milestones in international exhibition history. Her book Carolee Schneemann. Kinetic Painting was nominated by The New York Times as one of the best artist books in 2017.
Breitwieser is curator and director of pioneering retrospectives and solo exhibitions of numerous artists, including Etel Adnan, Anna Boghiguian, VALIE EXPORT, Harun Farocki, Simone Forti, Andrea Fraser, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Isaac Julien, Mary Kelly, William Kentridge, Edward Krasiński, Christian Marclay, Ana Mendieta, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Marisa Merz, Walter Pichler, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, Allan Sekula, Franz West, and Heimo Zobernig. With her program, in particular the thematic exhibitions she organized, Breitwieser regularly set trends, including: Up To And Including Limits: after Carolee Schneemann (Susch, 2019–2020), Art-Music-Dance, anti:modern (Salzburg, 2016), E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology (Salzburg, 2015), Art/Histories, Viennese Actionism (Salzburg, 2014), Performing Histories (New York, 2012), Utopia and Monument (Graz, 2009 and 2010), Modernologies (Barcelona and Warsaw, 2009–2010), Designs for the Real World (Vienna, 2002), double life (Vienna, 2001), RE-PLAY (Vienna, 2000), vivencias/life experience (Vienna, 2000), or White Cube/Black Box (Vienna, 1996).
Sabine Breitwieser leaves lasting marks in her various positions at museums. The Museum der Moderne Salzburg underwent a successful repositioning with a multidisciplinary, high-profile and global program. At the same time, the collections were upgraded under its management, the expertise in photography was expanded and the holdings were substantially expanded with around 3000 works. She was responsible for around seventy exhibitions in Salzburg, among them prominent international artists and art movements with a focus on women, as well as theses exhibitions with partly specific local connections. In Salzburg she also initiated a three-part series on artists with an exile background. For the collection of the Generali Foundation, which was won as its initiative on permanent loan to Salzburg, she established a series of rotating collection exhibitions. With the renovation of the historic Rupertinum museum building and the establishment of the Generali Foundation Study Center (2016) as well as the construction of a large highly professional art depot (2017), the museum’s infrastructure has experienced a quantum leap.
During her tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Breitwieser also organized numerous exhibitions and performance programs and acquired around 600 works for the collection including numerous donations. Some of her major purchase projects spanned several departments. How are we Performing Today? was the title of a two-day symposium organized by Breitwieser in 2012 to discuss current questions about performance art and the museum at MoMA. The MoMA Media Lounge designed by Renée Green, also organized by Breitwieser, was the first public platform of its kind in a New York museum that gave access to the collection of video-based works.
For the Generali Foundation in Vienna, for which she worked for almost twenty years in Vienna and most recently again in Salzburg for four years, she developed an internationally acclaimed program and built up a world-famous collection of more than 2000 works, published in the volumes Exhibitions 1989–2008 (2008) and Occupying Space. Generali Foundation Collection (2003). Under her leadership, the museum building of the Generali Foundation with the architects Jabornegg/Pálffy, opened in 1995 and praised for its high-quality and functional architecture, was also planned and built.