COLOGNE.- Kasper König announced the recent arrival of Katia Baudin, who assumed the position of Deputy Director at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne this past May.

With her tri-culturel background, education and experience (Germany, France, USA), Katia Baudin brings the museum her knowledge in both modern and contemporary art and design, with a particular expertise and interest in interdisciplinary cross-overs, as well as solid experience in collections conservation and development, and institutional and strategic management.

Among her first projects for the museum, she is currently preparing a retrospective exhibition on Franz West.

Biographical information: Ms Baudin (born in 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine) holds a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration from Hofstra University, New York and a Masters Degree in Art History from the Sorbonne University in Paris, where she is also preparing her PhD on Art and Design Crossovers.

She has worked in marketing research and strategic management consulting, in Saarbrucken (Germany) and Paris respectively, and in such museums as the Hofstra Museum (New York) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris) on both modern and contemporary exhibitions. Over the past ten years, she has directed two major French institutions specialized in contemporary art and design: the Fonds régional d'art contemporain (Frac) Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkirk (1997-2004) - which houses northern France´s key collection of international art and design since the 1960s -, and the Ecole supérieure des arts décoratifs (Esad) in Strasbourg (2004-2007), a leading academy in art, design and graphic design.

Over the years, she has initiated and curated numerous monographic and collections-based exhibitions in France and internationally (Switzerland, Germany, England, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy), as well as site specific projects in various contexts, from the white cube to the public space. For example: Plamen Dejanoff: Planets of Comparison (la Chaufferie, Esad, Strasboug, 2006), Miriam Bäckström: Appartments (billboard project, northern France, 2002-check), Tobias Rehberger: Seascapes and other Portraits (Frac, Dunkirk, 2000), Trafic d'Influences: Art & Design (Tri Postal, Lille cultural capital 2004), one of the first major exhibitions analyzing the parallels and differences between art and design since the 1960s.

She has also been responsible for the acquisition of over 200 works of art and design for the Frac Nord-Pas de Calais collection, among them major works by André Cadere, Leni Hoffmann, Simon Starling, Xavier Veilhan, as well as by designers like Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and Konstantin Grcic. As a member of the acquisitions committee of the Fonds national d'art contemporain based in Paris (2003-5) she acquired seminal works by Franz Ackermann and Elmgreen & Dragset for the national collection.

Initially a specialist of Otto Dix, Dadaism and the Neue Sachlichkeit, Katia Baudin has always been particularly attentive to German art. She has given lectures and written on both modern and contemporary art and design, as well as on architecture and fashion, and has taught at the Sorbonne, where she developed and managed the curatorial studies seminar and exhibition (2001-2005) within the Master's program in contemporary art.

Katia Baudin is also the next artistic director of the European Triennal of Small Scale Sculpture in Murska Sobota in Slovenija (2010).