Saskia van Stein is artistic and managing Director of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR). Van Stein currently also holds the position as Head of Department MA entitled The Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy, Eindhoven. Prior to this, she was artistic and managing Director at Bureau Europa, platform for architecture and design, Maastricht, 2013–2019. Over the span of her carrier, she has curated numerous (traveling) exhibitions, biennales, given (performative) lectures, spoken at or moderated symposia and contributed to other cultural events both in and outside of the confined walls of the institutional realm of the museum, in the Netherlands and abroad. She has often spearheaded topics and themes questioning cultural production and the designed environment itself.
Van Stein’s curatorial practice started at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (now Het Nieuwe Instituut) in Rotterdam, where she worked from 2002–2012, where her first steps were made by programming exhibitions on the intersection of architecture culture, political and human sciences and fine arts. There her deep-seated interest in the discourse surrounding the politics of representation was ignited. She continued to develop this through experimentation with different exhibition formats, modes of display and methods of knowledge production, as well as organizing and participating in numerous discursive events around the subject.
From a broad cultural perspective, van Stein examines issues related to contemporary societal urgencies and the role culture plays in addressing these issues. Her transdisciplinary cultural practice aims to convey the intricate way in which the social, the political, the economic, and the psychological are intertwined and interdependent, securitizing the ways in which these are analyzed, visualized and expressed through cultural production in the designed environment. She is committed to contributing to the development of a cultural discourse, and she is chair of several juries and member of advisory committees such as Independent School for the City in Rotterdam, the architecture journal OASE and member of the advisory council for Culture to the Dutch Government, Contemporary Art and Creative Industries.
Van Stein is presently a PhD candidate at the Curating Research Collective, Architecture and theory department at the Technical University in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.