Dr. Inke Arns is the director of the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund. She studied Slavic studies, Eastern European studies, political science and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam and received her doctorate from the HU Berlin in 2004. Since 1993, she has worked as a freelance curator and author specialising in media art and theory, net cultures and Eastern Europe. Her curatorial work has been reviewed in renowned media and has repeatedly received awards. She is the editor of numerous publications and author of many articles on media art and net culture. 2021-2022 she held a visiting professorship for curatorial practice at the Kunstakademie Münster, 2022 she was curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo (artist: Jakup Ferri) at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Since 2022 she has been a member of the Academy of the Arts of the World. Inke Arns has collaborated with the Goethe-Institut on several occasions, including curating the travelling exhibition "Die Grenze" together with Thibaut de Ruyter on behalf of the Goethe-Institut Moscow (2017-2019). From 2013 to 2019 she was a member of the Visual Arts Advisory Board of the Goethe-Institut.

Simone Baumann has been managing director of German Films since 2019 and previously worked as a film producer for over 25 years. She studied philosophy in Rostov/Don (Russia) and started her career in documentary film at MDR in the early 1990s. In 1997 she became managing partner of LE Vision Film- und Fernsehproduktion. From 2001 to 2019, she was the Eastern Europe foreign representative for German Films. Simone Baumann is a member of the Malik Bendjelloul Memorial Foundation, the Board of European Film Promotion and the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (Emmy Awards), among others. She has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since July 2022.

Christina Beinhoff has been Head of the Department for Culture and Society at the Federal Foreign Office since August 2025. After studying law, she initially worked at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development before moving to the Federal Foreign Office in 1999. Her diplomatic career took her to New York City, Seoul, and Paris, among other places. She subsequently took on various roles at the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Defense, and the Federal Chancellery, most recently as acting foreign and security policy advisor to the Federal Chancellor. From April 2022 to August 2025, she served as Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Kingdom of Sweden alongside her husband. Ms. Beinhoff is married and has two children.

After completing her apprenticeship as a carpenter, she studied industrial design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She then taught design history there (1994 to 2000). In 2006, she founded Vienna Design Week with Lilli Hollein and Thomas Geisler and was co-director until 2013. From 2001 to 2013, she also worked as a freelance design curator for exhibition projects throughout Europe. From 2014 to 2018, Beyerle was Director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden, Schloss Pillnitz, and also a member of the Management Board of the Dresden State Art Collections, one of Germany's leading museum associations. She has been Director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg since December 2018

Joana Breidenbach holds a doctorate in cultural anthropology, is a social entrepreneur, and author of numerous books on the cultural impact of globalization. She is co-founder of betterplace.org, Germany's largest donation platform. In 2010, she founded the betterplace lab, a think and do tank for researching the use of digital technologies for the common good. Joana describes the path to a fluid, competence-based hierarchy in her books New Work needs Inner Work and Die Entfaltete Organisation (both with Bettina Rollow, Vahlen Verlag, 2019 and 2022). She explores the importance of inner work for new forms of leadership and shaping the future, including on innerwork.online. In line with her interest in digital-social innovations, she supports and invests in companies and organizations such as ReDI School, Interface, and DeepL. She is a member of the supervisory board of gut.org gAG and Trivago. In 2021, she founded brafe.space with friends as a network for entrepreneurs and investors.

Inés de Castro studied ethnology at the University of Bonn and received her doctorate in 2002 with an ethnohistorical thesis on the Caste War of Yucatán. From 2006 to 2010, she was curator and later deputy director of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim. Since 2010, she has been director of the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, where she has been responsible for numerous important exhibitions, including “Maori,” “Maya Code,” and “Aztecs.”
De Castro is involved in provenance research and advocates for open dialogue about colonial collections. She is a member of various academic committees. In 2020, she was awarded the Order of Merit of the State of Baden-Württemberg for her services.

Saba-Nur Cheema is a political scientist and anti-racism trainer. From 2015-2021, she was the educational director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre in Frankfurt. She is currently a researcher on Anti-Semitism in educational contexts at Goethe University. Cheema is a member of the German government's Independent Expert Group on Muslimophobia, which was appointed in 2020. She is co-editor of the book "Frenemies. Antisemitismus, Rassismus und ihre Kritiker*innen" (2022) and designed the new online dossier "Jewish Life in the Past & Present" for the Federal Agency for Civic Education in 2021. In 2024, she published the book ‘Muslimisch-jüdisches Abendbrot
Das Miteinander in Zeiten der Polarisierung’ together with Meron Mendel. She has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since July 2022.

Ferenc Csák has been the Head of the Cultural Department of the City of Chemnitz since 2015 and is also the city's project officer for the implementation of the Capital of Culture programme for 2025. After studying art history and political science, he held various management positions in the cultural sector in Hungary. From 2010 to 2012 he was General Director of the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest and from 2010 to 2011 Clore (Cultural Leadership Programme) Fellow in London. Since 2015, he has been a member of the board of the Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft e. V. and the Rotary Club Tertia in Chemnitz. He has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since July 2022.

He is a jury member of Resonanzen - Schwarzes Literaturfestival, curated by Sharon Dodua Otoo, and regularly publishes on the literature of transculturality and the significance of African literature in the world of tomorrow. For the Berlin Senate, he is working on a concept for remembering colonialism, and for the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin he is active in the decolonisation competence centre. Diop lives and works in Berlin.

Olga Grjasnowa has spent long periods abroad in Poland, Russia and Israel. She is a graduate of the German Literature Institute Leipzig and has published four novels so far. For her highly acclaimed debut "Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt" (2012), Grjasnowa was awarded the Klaus-Michael Kühne Prize and the Anna Seghers Prize. In 2016, she was a scholarship holder at the Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul for seven months. Most recently, her novel „Der verlorene Sohn“ (2020) and the essay „Die Macht der Mehrsprachigkeit. Über Herkunft und Vielfalt“ (2021) have been published. Olga Grjasnowa 's works have been translated into 15 languages, dramatised for stage and radio and made into films. She has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since July 2016. Since 2023, she has been a professor of language arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Prof. Manuel Hartung has been Chairman of the Board of the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius since January 2022. Previously, he headed the WISSEN department of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT since 2019 and was editor of the magazines ZEIT CAMPUS, ZEIT GERMANY and ZEIT SPEZIAL. Manuel Hartung has been associated with DIE ZEIT with interruptions since 2004 - among other things as editor-in-chief of ZEIT CAMPUS, as managing director of the subsidiary of ZEIT-Verlag, TEMPUS CORPORATE, and - between 2015 and 2019 - as head of the education department CHANCEN. Manuel Hartung attended the Henri Nannen School of Journalism in Hamburg and studied history in Bonn and New York as well as public administration at Harvard. He taught at the Universities of St. Gallen and Göttingen; he currently teaches at the Institute for Culture and Media Management at the University of Music and Theatre in Hamburg. Manuel Hartung has been a member of the Bucerius Law School Board of Trustees since 2017. Since 2022, he has also been Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Bucerius Law School and of the Board of Trustees of the Bucerius Kunst Forum. Since 2023, he has been a member of the programme council of the Futurium. Previously, he was involved in the university council of Coburg University of Applied Sciences, the advisory board of Common Purpose Germany and the board of the Values Commission, among others.

Philipp Haußmann completed his second state examination in law before joining what is now the Klett Group as a trainee in 1995. In the years that followed, he held various positions in subsidiaries of the Klett Group - from Editorial Director of PONS GmbH to Managing Director of Ernst Klett Sprachen Verlag. Since 2007, Philipp Haußmann has been Spokesman of the Management Board of Ernst Klett AG and is directly responsible for the holding companies Klett Lernen und Information (KLI) and Klett Kita und Schule (K&S) as well as the corporate communications of the Klett Group. As a family member, Philipp Haußmann today represents the fourth generation of the educational group and is a shareholder of the company.

Gesche Joost is a professor of design research at the Berlin University of the Arts and works at the interfaces between science, politics and digital companies. Her work is about digital transformation in society and business. She heads the Design Research Lab and designs new forms of human-technology interaction at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence. She is a member of the supervisory boards of SAP, ING Deutschland and ottobock and in 2016 co-founded the non-profit startup Calliope gGmbH, which gives children access to digital education. She has been on the presidium of the Goethe-Institut since January 2022 and 1st Vice President since January 2023.

Dr Annekathrin Kohout is a cultural historian and media scientist. She studied German language and literature, art history, media theory and photography in Dresden, Karlsruhe and Leipzig. She worked at the ZKM Karlsruhe until 2015 and as a research assistant at the Department of German Studies at the University of Siegen until 2022, where she completed her doctorate in 2021. In addition to her work as a freelance author, she is co-editor of the magazine "Pop. Kultur und Kritik" and editor of the international "Journal of Global Pop Cultures". She is also co-editor of the book series "Digitale Bildkulturen" published by Klaus Wagenbach. In her writings, Kohout focusses on the aesthetics, history and theory of pop and popular culture, social media and contemporary art. Since 2014, she has been writing about the intersections of pop, internet phenomena and art on the blog "Sofrischsogut". She is also the author of the book "Netzfeminismus", a short and concise cultural and discourse history of female image politics. 2022 saw the publication of "Nerds. Eine Popkulturgeschichte" was published in 2022, and her new book "K-Pop. Local popular culture, global alternative culture?" will be published in 2023.

Janina Kugel is a German manager and supervisory board member. She was a member of the board and labour director of Siemens from 2015 to 2020. Janina Kugel is a multi-supervisory board member in Germany and abroad and a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and EQT. In 2018, Kugel was selected by a jury as "Prima inter Pares" on a list of the 100 most influential women in German business. She is, among other things, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Technical University of Munich and the International Advisory Board of the IESE Business School. She has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since July 2022.

Christian Kullmann is Chairman of the Executive Board of Evonik Industries AG. He studied economic history at the University of Hanover. Kullmann began his professional career in 1994 at Deutsche Vermögensberatung AG in Frankfurt. In 1996 he switched to Dresdner Bank. From 2003, Christian Kullmann headed the Central Communications and Executive Office department at RAG Aktiengesellschaft in Essen and held this position at Evonik Industries AG, Essen, from 2007 to 2013. He was appointed General Representative of Evonik Industries AG in 2013 and was appointed to the Executive Board on 1 July 2014. In May 2017, Christian Kullmann took over as Chairman of the Executive Board of Evonik Industries AG. In March 2020, he was elected President of the German Chemical Industry Association. He has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since July 2022 and is Chairman of the Goethe-Institut's Business Advisory Board.

Jo Lendle, born in 1968, is a writer and publisher at Hanser Verlag. He studied literature, cultural studies, and philosophy in Hildesheim, Montreal, and Leipzig. He began his career as an editor at DuMont Buchverlag and became managing director of publishing in 2010. He became publisher of Hanser Verlag in 2014. He has taught as a visiting professor and lecturer at various universities, volunteers as chairman of the publishers' committee, and is a juror for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, among other things. Jo Lendle is the author of several novels, most recently “Die Himmelsrichtungen” published in 2024.

Henning Lobin studied German language and literature, philosophy and IT. In 1999, he was appointed to the Chair of Applied Linguistics and Computational Linguistics at the University of Gießen. Since 2018, he has been Director of the Leibniz Institute für Deutsche Sprache and Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Mannheim. Lobin is a member of the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung (German Spelling Council) and spokesperson for the Humanities and Educational Research Section of the Leibniz Association. In 2021, he published the book "Sprachkampf" on current language policy debates with Duden-Verlag.

Dr Ulrika Ulrike Lorenz has been President of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar since 2019. Previously, the art historian with a doctorate in art history headed the Kunsthalle Mannheim for over ten years and was responsible, among other things, for its new building with a dynamic museum concept and digital strategy. In 2018, she was awarded the Golden Badge of Honour of the Frauenbrücke Prize for the inner unity of Germany. Since 2014, she has been an active member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin - Section "Visual Arts". Ulrike Lorenz has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since December 2020.

Jagoda Marinić is a Croatian-German writer, playwright and columnist. She studied German, political science and English in Heidelberg. She published her first collection of stories "Eigentlich ein Heiratsantrag" in 2001 and was awarded the Grimmelshausen Prize for "Russische Bücher" (2005). Her debut novel "Die Namenlose" was published in 2006, followed in 2016 by the novel "Made in Germany - Was ist deutsch in Deutschland", in which she explores Germany's identity as a country of immigration. Since January 2022, she has been writing a fortnightly column in the Stern. Jagoda Marinić has also been the director of the Intercultural Centre in Heidelberg since 2012.

Armin Nassehi is Professor of Sociology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and has been its Vice-President since October 2025. As a researcher, he investigates how decisions are made in complex situations and how different perspectives within society converge in the fields of economics, politics, science, media and culture. He was born in Tübingen and grew up in Munich, Landshut, Tehran and Gelsenkirchen. He studied education, philosophy and sociology in Münster and Hagen and has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich since 1998. In 2024, the sociologist was appointed by the German government as a member of the German Ethics Council.
Nassehi has also been active as a publicist in recent years. His books Muster. Theorie der digitalen Gesellschaft (Patterns: Theory of Digital Society, 2019) and Das große Nein. Eigendynamik des gesellschaftlichen Protests (The Big No: The Momentum of Social Protest, 2020) have attracted considerable attention. He also occasionally writes guest articles for major German newspapers and appears on television and in talk shows, as well as acting as a speaker and advisor in the fields of business and culture.

Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a curator, author, biotechnologist and, since 2023, artistic director at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HWK) in Berlin. He is the founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, artistic director of Sonsbeek20-24, and artistic director of the 13th Bamako Encounters 2022. Ndikung was the lead curator of Adam Szymczyk's Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017; guest curator of the Dak'Art Biennale in Dakar in 2018, and artistic director of the 12th Bamako Encounters in 2019. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He is currently a professor in the MA programme Spatial Strategies at Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin. He has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since July 2022.

After studying architecture, Anh-Linh Ngo worked as an architecture journalist and curator. He is editor-in-chief of the international architecture magazine ARCH+. With ARCH+, he regularly curates exhibition and research projects such as projekt bauhaus (2015–2019), Cohabitation (2021), The Great Repair (2023/24) and the German Pavilion at the 18th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2023. From 2010 to 2016, he was a member of the Art Advisory Board of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa). He is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of IBA 2027 StadtRegion Stuttgart and the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since 2021, he has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in the Architecture section, and since May 2024, Vice-President of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Thomas Oberender is an author, curator and dramaturge. He studied theatre studies and scenic writing in Berlin and wrote his doctorate on Botho Strauß. Oberender was a co-founder of the authors’ theatre association Theater neuen Typs in Berlin. In 1999 he became head dramaturge at the Schauspielhaus Bochum and then co-director at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. He was theatre director of the Salzburg Festival, then artistic director and managing director of the Berlin Festivals. He publishes plays, reviews and essays on contemporary artists and political and aesthetic transformation processes. Since January 2022 he has been on the board of the Goethe-Institut.

Dr Nicolas Peter Chairman of the BMW Group since 2025 as well as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt of the BMW Group since 2020. He has long been associated with the Goethe-Institut as a member of the Economic Advisory Board. From 2017 to May 2023, he was a member of the Board of Management for Finance at BMW AG. In his CFO role, he has primarily promoted the idea of sustainability in finance and industry, particularly in various honorary roles, including at the Value Balanced Alliance (vba) as well as at the DRSC and the Deutsches Aktieninstitut. Nicolas Peter is also a member of the Economic Advisory Council of the French Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany and holds the honorary title of Conseiller du Commerce Exterieur de la France. He holds a Master's degree in law from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He obtained his doctorate there in 1989 (Dr jur.) and passed his second state examination in law in 1991.

Sandra Richter studied political science, German language and literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Hamburg, obtained her doctorate in 1998 at Justus Liebig University in Giessen and habilitated in 2003 at the Department of Linguistics, Literature and Media Studies at the University of Hamburg. From 2008 to 2025, she was Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Stuttgart and has been Professor of German Literature at the University of Hamburg since 1 October 2025. From 2018 to 2023, Sandra Richter was a member of the Council for Information Infrastructures. Since 2021, she has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, since 2022 a member of the Senate of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, and since 2025 a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Her research and work focus on intellectual history, poetics and aesthetics, methodology, and empirical literary studies. Sandra Richter has been director of the German Literature Archive in Marbach since 2019. She has been a member of the Goethe-Institut since July 2018.

After studying and completing his doctorate in Jena and Giessen, he worked at Japanese universities for 20 years and has been an associate professor at Keio University Tokyo since 2008. Since 2021, he has been Professor of Didactics of German as a Foreign and Second Language at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. In his academic work, he is primarily concerned with the professionalisation of teachers, the didactics of foreign language teaching and empirical teaching research. He is the author of a volume in the Goethe Institute's training series "Deutsch Lehren Lernen".

He studied the viola at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin and musicology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Together with Titus Engel, he founded the Akademie Mu-siktheater Heute, which has been continued as a Deutsche Bank initiative since 2001. In spring 2001, he began working at the Salzburg Festival as personal assistant to the artistic director and dramaturgical assistant. In the same role, he went to the Ruhr with Gerard Mortier to help develop the first RuhrTriennale from 2002 to 2004. From 2004 to 2008, he worked at the Opéra National de Paris Bastille/Garnier, initially as Adjoint au Directeur and from 2006 as Directeur de la coordination artistique. From 2008/2009 to 2016/2017, he was Artistic Director at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Viktor Schoner has been Artistic Director of the State Opera Stuttgart since 2018/19. His particular concern to keep opera relevant for future generations on stage, backstage and in the auditorium is reflected in the establishment of a separate venue for the Junge Oper and the founding of AKADEMIE2030.

Michael Schwarz studied administrative science in Konstanz and in the USA. He has been working in the foundation sector since 2005, when he joined the Robert Bosch Stiftung after a stint as a consultant at CNC AG, an international strategic communications consultancy. There, he first worked as a project manager in the field of science, then as an assistant to the executive board and most recently as head of communications. In 2014, Michael Schwarz switched to Stiftung Mercator, where he was Managing Director until 2022. Since March 2022, he has been Managing Director of the Baden-Baden Entrepreneurial Talks.

Hito Steyerl studied cinematography and documentary filmmaking in Tokyo and Munich and earned her doctorate with a thesis in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She worked at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College in London, was a professor of experimental film and video at the Berlin University of the Arts, and was a visiting professor in Copenhagen and Helsinki.
In 2021, Steyerl received the Honorary B3 BEN Award in the category of art. She is the recipient of the 2019 Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 2015, Steyerl was awarded the EYE Prize by the EYE Film Institute Netherlands and the Paddy & Joan Leigh Fermor Arts Fund.
Her numerous works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2022), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. She lives and works in Berlin.

Nominated by the SPD parliamentary group of the German Bundestag, Berlin

appointed by the parliamentary group DIE LINKE (The Left Party) of the German Parliament, Berlin

appointed by parliamentary group BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN of the German Parliament, Berlin

appointed by the CDU/CSU parliamentary group of the German Parliament, Berlin

Representative of the Länder Governments appointed by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder of the Federal Republic of Germany,Ministry of Education and Child Day Care, Schwerin

Representative of the State Governments appointed by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany, Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, Munich

Bettina Lantz-Okoye has been working in client management, accounting and business organisation at the Goethe-Institut Düsseldorf since 2002. Since 2010, she has been involved in the Goethe-Institut's GEW staff union, the local works council and as a representative on the general works council and the European works council. Before joining the Goethe-Institut, she studied German, English and Romance languages with a focus on literary translation in Düsseldorf after several stays abroad. She then trained as a bookseller and worked in this profession for many years. As a qualified DaF teacher, she taught German as a foreign language on a freelance basis. She is involved in civil society work in the field of refugees and migration. Since 2021, she has been the employee representative for the Region Germany on the Executive Board of the Goethe-Institut. She ran for re-election in 2025 and was elected by the employees of the Goethe-Institut for another four years.

Tilman Schaich grew up in Munich and studied industrial design at the University of Art and Design in Linz. He initially worked as an industrial designer and design manager in Munich, Zurich and Vienna, later as a product manager in the office furniture industry and as a site manager in the events industry. From 2014 to 2020, he was responsible as project manager for organising events, exhibitions and networking formats for the creative and innovation industry as well as in the field of democracy promotion. Schaich has been working at the Goethe-Institut since 2021, initially as a consultant for innovation in the strategy department and currently in the same role in the Digital Transformation Unit (EDiT), where he also took on the role of deputy head in 2025.
For many years, he volunteered in a citizens' initiative for affordable housing, cultural freedom and against social exclusion.

Kirsten Hackenbroch studied spatial planning at the Technical University of Dortmund and worked in research and teaching for over ten years – in Dortmund, Cologne, Freiburg and at LMU Munich, among other places. Her focus areas were urban planning, urban research, cultural anthropology and environmental social sciences. She has been working for the Goethe-Institut since 2017 – six years as director of the institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and currently in Sofia, Bulgaria. In her work, she is committed to social diversity and wants to empower cultural actors outside the major cities. She attaches great importance to clear decision-making processes and open cooperation in which different perspectives are heard and taken into account. Since 2026, she is the representative of employees abroad on the Executive Board of the Goethe-Institut.