Birgit Hein


Birgit Hein is a German film director, producer, performance artist, university professor, and screenwriter who has made experimental films since 1960s, with her then husband Wilhem Heim.

Biography

Hein was born in Berlin in 1942. With her structural films, performances, documentary film essays and film study publications, she is considered one of the decisive pioneers of German underground and experimental films. In 1964, she married Wilhelm Hein, with whom she collaborated on several experimental film projects. In 1968, she co-founded XSCREEN, an exhibition space in Cologne. In 1993, Hein won the German Film Critics Association Best Experimental Film Award for her film Die Unheimlichen Frauen.
Hein studied art history and theater studies at the University of Cologne in the early 1960s. From 1966 to 1988 she worked with Wilhelm Hein producing films and working on performances with him. She was represented with two film works, together with Wilhelm Hein within Documenta V in Kassel in 1972, a worldwide exhibition of influential art after World War II. Their combined work was presented in different retrospectives, e.g. in the Anthology Archives, New York, in the Filmmuseum Frankfurt as well as in Cologne and in Copenhagen. In the 1970s they organized and curated of several exhibitions on experimental film, e.g. Art Remains Art, Film As Film and Film As Film. For the Goethe-Institut they toured in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India and took part in the International Experimental Film Congress Toronto.
In Cologne she was art founder of XScreen for subculture performances and program work for diverse cinemas. In the 1970s, she taught film art assignments at various universities. She undertook a number of important curatorial projects, including the groundbreaking film section at Documenta VI. Birgit Hein has been a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art since 1990, retiring in 2007.
Many premieres of her films at the Forum des Junge Films, Berlin Film Festival as well as television broadcasts and acquisitions of film collections. She has had several exhibitions of her works, e.g. Montreal 2000, Rotterdam 2000, Madrid 2002 and the Arsenal Berlin 2003.
Since 2007 she has been a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and since 2012 she has been deputy director of the visual arts section.

Filmography