Biography

Sculptor and Installation Artist Liz Bachhuber is currently a Professor of Fine Art (Frei Kunst) at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Her research interests and artistic practice focuses on the environment with a particular emphasis on the found object in Art and the global implications of unbridled consumerism and the resulting garbage. She has a long history, in the tradition of the Bauhaus University of working in the intersection of Art and Science and initiating collaborations with engineers, scientists and waste disposal experts.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Liz Bachhuber studied at the University of Wisconsin, BFA (1976) MA (1979) and from 1979-83 at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf on a Fulbright/DAAD grant, earning an additional Master's Degree »Meisterschülerin« in 1983-84. She was a founding member of the studio cooperative Ratherstrasse 25 in Düsseldorf 1981-87 where she concentrated on sculpture and large-scale installation work. In 1984 she spent a year working in Rome through a travel grant from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The same year she received a Kunstfonds grant in Bonn. In 1988 she won an Emerging Artist Award from the City of Düsseldorf. In the same year she presented her work at the Art Cologne in a booth for emerging artists at the Gallery Edith Wahland. From 1987 to 1989 she worked in New York supported by the National Studio Program at P.S. 1. From 1990 to 1991 she held a grant from the US National Endowment for the Arts. After a guest professorship in 1992 at the Kunstakademie Münster, she was a founding member of the Faculty of Art and Design at the Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar in 1993. In 2001 she founded the English-language, international MFA-Program »Public Art and New Artistic Strategies« supported by DAAD. 

Her longstanding interest in the environment, recycling and technology led to the following research projects and Art exhibits: »Das Müll Projekt,« 1993; »Flottsam and Jetsam« 2001 in collaboration with the Chair for Waste Management at the Bauhaus University, and »Entrop(H)y: Garbage and Art« 2011 in collaboration with the Engineering faculty. She has also spearheaded long-running interfaculty collaborations between Art and  the Environmental Engineering chair »Biotechnology in the Resource Economy« and with international partners such as the University of California San Diego in the context of the DAAD-Program »Strategic University Partnerships« at the Tijuana/San Diego Border and with the »Experimental Drawing Studio« of UCSD.

Additionally, since 1980 she has shown her work in the public realm, in solo and group exhibitions in galleries, museums, Kunstvereine and alternative spaces in Europe, the USA and Asia.