Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is the head of the Berlinale Forum Expanded programme. She is also currently interim head of the Forum section, alongside Milena Gregor and Birgit Kohler. Schulte Strathaus was born in Frankfurt in 1969. She studied German philology, as well as philosophy and theatre studies in Cologne and Berlin. While she was studying, she also worked on experimental exhibition and cinema projects.
In 1991, she began working for the association “Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek” (Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek) and in 1994 she became a programme director for the in-house Arsenal cinema. Ten years later, she, Milena Gregor and Birgit Kohler started running the association, which was renamed “Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art” in 2008.
Schulte Strathaus has curated a number of film programmes, retrospectives and exhibitions, including “Wer sagt denn, dass Beton nicht brennt, hast Du's probiert? Film im West-Berlin der 80er Jahre” (with Florian Wüst in 2006) and “Live Film! Jack Smith! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World“ (with Susannne Sachsse and Marc Siegel in 2009). In 2010, she launched the ongoing project “Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice”. She and Bettina Ellerkamp and Jörg Heitmann founded the “Film Feld Forschung” (Film Field Research) project at the silent green Kulturquartier. Schulte Strathaus is on the board of the Harun Farocki Institut and that of the Network for Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS).
Schulte Strathaus has been a member of the selection committee of the Berlinale’s Forum section since 2001. She and Anselm Franke founded Forum Expanded in 2005. In summer 2018, she took over as interim head of the Forum with her colleagues on the Arsenal board.
