Kimberly Bradley is an art critic, culture writer, editor, educator, and moderator based in Berlin. When she writes, it’s often—but not always—about art or the art world. Born in a California desert town and raised in northern Minnesota, she graduated from Middlebury College in 1990. After a half-decade in Hamburg and a decade in New York, she moved to the German capital in the early 2000s.1
Bradley’s writing is journalistic and essayistic, critical and occasionally commercial. Some of this naturally responds to the conditions (and cultural events) in Central Europe, but in recent years Bradley’s reviews and essays focus on the art, artists, and curators grappling with extinction, migration, labor, gender, and other hot-button—but not hopeless—issues. Recent profiles include Paola Antonelli, Sammy Baloji, Elmgreen + Dragset, Cécile B. Evans, John Gerrard, Bonaventure Ndikung, Anri Sala, Hito Steyerl, Tomás Saraceno, Sissel Tolaas, Ming Wong, and Tobias Zielony.
She has written for a long list of publications including AD, Aperture, Art-Agenda, ArtAsiaPacific, artnet.com, ArtReview, Artsy, BBC Culture, Domus, Flash Art, Frieze, GEO Saison, The International Herald Tribune, Metropolis, Mousse, The New York Times, PIN-UP, Smithsonian, Spiegel Online, Spike, Sueddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, WSJ. Magazine and many others. She contributes to artist monographs and has co-produced documentaries, image films, and podcasts. In 2001 she was an Arthur F. Burns fellow at the Sueddeutsche Zeitung Magazin in Munich. Long ago in the mid-1990s, she spent a year on the other side, doing cultural press at Goethe-Institut New York.
Bradley is the Berlin correspondent for Monocle magazine and reports for M24, Monocle’s web radio station. She teaches courses on contemporary art practices at New York University’s Berlin campus, taught art writing at the Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria, in 2016, 2017, and 2019, and will teach a course in art writing at University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, once the plague lifts. She appears in discussions as a moderator or panelist, and occasionally acts as a consultant for cultural institutions. Bradley is a member of the German section of AICA (International Association of Art Critics).
She finds it a bit silly to write about herself in the third person.
1 There were also years of commuting between Vienna and Berlin
and in the late 2010s suddenly reporting breaking news in Austria
due to turbulent geopolitics. It’s complicated, but it explains all
the Austria on these pages.