Kia Vahland
Journalist and Book Author
Kia Vahland has been an editor at the Süddeutsche Zeitung since 2008, where she was head of the art section until 2017 and co-founded the SZ opinion section in 2018. She studied art history and political science in Rome, Hamburg, and Dijon and worked as an editor for the magazine Art and the ZDF program “Willemsens Woche.” Vahland writes for Geo Epoche and is a columnist for Radio Bremen and the Swiss magazine Republik. She teaches at the Deutsche Journalistenschule and at LMU Munich.
During her fellowship, Kia Vahland will investigate which museum concepts are able to build community and do justice to the diverse historical past and a tense present, and what we can learn from this for the future. She is interested in the key role that museums, memory spaces, and world heritage sites can play as places of high credibility.
Selected Awards
2025 / 2026 | Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) Berlin
2019 | Nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Non-Fiction
2016 | Michael Althen Award for criticism by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Selected Publications
2025 | Kunstgeschichten: Alte Bilder, neue Zeiten, Berlin: Insel Verlag.
2024 | Caspar David Friedrich und der weite Horizont, Berlin: Insel Verlag.
2020 | The Da Vinci Women. The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardos’s Art, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal.