Catherine Nichols is an Australian curator, writer, and arts and literary scholar based in Berlin, whose work moves across contemporary art, cultural history, and interdisciplinary research. She left Sydney for Berlin in 1999, originally intending to pursue an academic career in German Studies and Comparative Literature, a field in which she went on to earn her PhD. Shortly after completing her doctorate, an opportunity at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof drew her into the visual arts world instead, a shift she has described as a fortuitous accident that became a lasting career.
Nichols is currently a curator at Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, where she has organized numerous monographic and thematic exhibitions since joining the institution. Her exhibitions there include Beuys: We Are the Revolution (2008), The End of the 20th Century: The Best Is Yet to Come (2013), and Capital: Debt – Territory – Utopia (2016), the latter two developed in collaboration with Eugen Blume. She also co-curated Everyone Is an Artist: Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, alongside Isabelle Malz and Eugen Blume. More recent projects at Hamburger Bahnhof include Alexandra Pirici – Attune (2024), Joseph Beuys – Werke aus der Sammlung der Nationalgalerie (2024), and Nationalgalerie: Eine Sammlung für das 21. Jahrhundert (2023), alongside solo exhibitions of Colombian artist Delcy Morelos and Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj in 2025.
Beyond the museum, Nichols has taken on major leadership roles in large-scale, city-spanning cultural projects. From 2019 to 2021, she co-led Beuys 2021: 100 Jahre Joseph Beuys with Eugen Blume, a year-long, region-wide centenary program reexamining the legacy of the German artist Joseph Beuys across North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2022, she served as curator of Manifesta 14, the European Nomadic Biennial, staged in Pristina, Kosovo, under the title it matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise. The exhibition unfolded across 25 sites of cultural and historical significance throughout the city and explored the transformative power of storytelling in shaping public life. Announcing her appointment to that role, Manifesta organizers highlighted the palpable sense she had encountered in Pristina of how storytelling itself brings a shared public realm into being.
Nichols is also an active writer and editor who has published widely on contemporary art. Her books and edited volumes include The New Designer: Design as a Profession for the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (2023); Otherwise (2022), the companion publication to Manifesta 14 Pristina; Shine on Me: Wir und die Sonne (2018); and Black Mountain College: An Interdisciplinary Experiment, 1933–1957 (2015).
In 2025, it was announced that Nichols would curate the 18th edition of the Biennale de Lyon (Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon), set to run from September to December 2026. Reflecting on the appointment, Nichols described the Biennale as a long-ambitious space for artistic inquiry and political imagination, where art engages with the complexity of the world, and said she felt greatly honored to build on its legacy while exploring new artistic and intellectual directions.
In June 2026, it was announced that she would become the Artistic Director of Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial, to happen in 2028 in Coimbra, Portugal.
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