Thomas Girst

Cultural Manager; Writer / Product Design / Germany / BMW Group

Thomas Girst (b. 1971) studied art history, American Studies, and German literature at Hamburg University and New York University (DAAD Scholarship), completing a Ph.D. dissertation on “Art, Literature, and the Japanese-American Internment Experience.” A former cultural correspondent for the Tageszeitung, he was also the founding editor of the international literature and art anthology Die Aussenseite des Elementes (1991–2003). As research manager of the Art Science Research Laboratory under the directorship of Harvard University professor Stephen Jay Gould, Girst was editor-in-chief of Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal (1998–2003).

Since 2003, he has served as Head of Cultural Engagement at the BMW Group. He lectures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and the Academy of Fine Arts Munich as well as at the Academy of Applied Sciences in Zurich. Girst was nominated as “Cultural Manager of the Year” in 2008 and 2009. In 2012, he curated Marcel Duchamp in Munich 1912, whose catalogue he co-edited. His most recent publications include The Indefinite Duchamp (Hatje Cantz, 2013), BMW Art Cars (editor, Hatje Cantz, 2013; avialable in the U.S. 2014), and The Duchamp Dictionary (Thames & Hudson, 2014).

Contributed Articles

Daily Features
By Thomas Girst December 4, 2013

BMW’s Thomas Girst read Stephen King as a child. Today he’s in the middle of rereading all the volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. “While reading Proust, you live with him,” Girst says, among many more answers to The Proust Questionnaire—Book Edition.

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