Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders (born 1945, Düsseldorf, Germany) is a director, producer, photographer, and author.  He is considered a pioneer of 1970s New German Cinema and one of the most important representatives of contemporary cinema internationally. In addition to multi-award-winning feature films, such as Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), he has also created several innovative documentaries such as PINA (2011), Buena Vista Social Club (1999), The Salt of the Earth (2014), and Pope Francis - A Man of his Word (2018). Photography has been an intrinsic part of his artistic output from the beginning, with his seminal series WRITTEN IN THE WEST, which came into being during the preparations for his film Paris, Texas (1984), as Wenders’ journeys crisscrossing the American West. 

Wenders’ photographs have been exhibited in museums around the world, he has published numerous photo books, film books and collections of essays. His work has been shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris (1986); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001); the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003); the Shanghai Museum of Art (2004); the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome (2006); the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2010); the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2012); the Fundació Sorigué, Lleida (2013); the Villa Pignatelli, Naples (2013); GL Strand, Copenhagen (2014); and Villa Panza, Varese (2015). A comprehensive retrospective of his photographs has been exhibited at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf (2015). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival, held a major career retrospective in 2015 of 20 feature films and numerous shorts, displaying the breadth of Wenders’ career, from his 16mm experimental works of the late 1960s to his most recent nonfiction work. Between 2019 and 2022, Wim Wenders also produced three art installations: EMOTION, a monumental seven-stream projection based on Wenders’ most iconic films, created with and for the Grand Palais in Paris; Two Or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper, a 3D film installation created for the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Foundation Beyeler in 2020. And Présence, a 3D installation on the work of French artist Claudine Drai which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Wenders has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 1984, and holds honorary doctorates from the Sorbonne in Paris (1989), the Faculty of Theology at the University of Fribourg (1995), the University of Louvain (2005) and the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Catania (2010). He taught as a professor at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg until 2017. Wim Wenders is a member of the order Pour le Mérite and he has been President of the European Film Academy since 1996.