Mara Kölmel
Mara-Johanna Kölmel is a German curator and art historian.
Kölmel has worked internationally in various curatorial positions, including for the Biennale of Sydney, the Arko Art Centre Seoul, the Kunsthalle Hamburg and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. She has been the head of the Art Department at the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, since January 2024.
Her curatorial practice focuses on the intersections of art, technology, and society, addressing pressing contemporary issues through a plurality of perspectives. Demonstrated by the 2025 exhibition "Choose your Player. Gaming from Dice to Pixel" as reviewed by ARD Tagesschau and SWR Fernsehen.
Early life and education
Kölmel completed her master's degree in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and earned her PhD from Leuphana University of Lüneburg with the dissertation Sculpture in the Augmented Sphere.This research, supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation known also as the Studienstiftung has led to a book backed by the Henry Moore Foundation and the Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation for the Humanities. It explores the transformation of sculpture through digital technologies by investigating how speculative, feminist and decolonial sculptural concepts acquire new meaning in the digital realm, with a book on the topic to be published by DeGruyter in 2025.
Career (selected)
- Head of Art Department, at Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen
- Head Curator, at V.O Curations, London
- Co-Founder, at SALOON.London, Women In Arts Network, London & Board Member, at SALOON International
- Curator, at ApprovedPablo, London
- Curator, at peer-to-space, Berlin
- Guest-curator, at ARKO Art Center, Seoul
- Curator-in-Residence, Digital Solitude at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart
- Curatorial Assistant, at Biennale of Sydney
- Program Curator, at Young Patrons Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg