Katharina Otto-Bernstein

Katharina Otto-Bernstein is a German-American filmmaker and producer. She is best known for directing and producing films including The Price of Everything, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, Absolute Wilson, When Night Falls Over Moscow, The Need for Speed: Bicycle Messengers in New York, and Beautopia. She is also the author of An Intimate Memoir of Theatre and Opera and directed the stage play Absolute Wilson—The Biography.

Otto-Bernstein (née Otto) was born in Hamburg, Germany. She attended St. Clare's Hall in Oxford, England. She later earned a bachelor's degree and an MFA in Film from Columbia University School of the Arts.

As an undergraduate, Otto-Bernstein worked for Town & Country and wrote a lifestyle column for German Vogue. In 1989, while enrolled in the Columbia University graduate film program, she was hired by British director Don Boyd (Aria, Twenty-One, My Kingdom) to work on an East-West thriller. When the production crew arrived in Berlin, Otto-Bernstein witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the unification of East and West Germany. This event led her to direct the television documentary Coming Home (1990), which focuses on the reunification of German families. She also compiled the interview collection In the Shadow of the Wall, which featured interviews with East German personalities, including intelligence agents Günter Guillaume and Ruth Kuczynski (aka Red Sonja).

After returning to the US, Otto-Bernstein directed the comedy The Second Greatest Story Ever Told (1992), starring Mira Sorvino and Malcolm McDowell; the television documentary The Need for Speed: Bicycle Messengers in New York (1993); and the American segments of the documentaries When Night Falls Over Moscow - Arms Dealing in the Former Soviet Union and The Industrialists Hall of Fame (1993).[citation needed ]

Otto-Bernstein's Beautopia premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. The film explores the modeling industry and features fashion figures such as Claudia Schiffer, Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Karl Lagerfeld, and Calvin Klein. Beautopia was nominated for the Grand Prize at Sundance and won the Silver Hugo award at the Chicago International Film Festival. Janet Maslin of The New York Times described the film as "a terrific and lively feminist analysis".

In 1998, Otto-Bernstein met American theatre and opera director Robert Wilson (Einstein on the Beach, Black Rider, Lohengrin) at a cocktail party. This meeting led to a seven-year collaboration on the biopic Absolute Wilson. The film features collaborators such as Philip Glass, David Byrne, Tom Waits, Jessye Norman, and Susan Sontag in one of her last interviews. Absolute Wilson premiered at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival and was shown at various international festivals, earning the Art Film of the Year award from Art Basel. Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that "An artist who operates on such a ground-breaking, international level as Robert Wilson deserves a documentary as good as Absolute Wilson." A. O. Scott of The New York Times noted that "Absolute Wilson makes you wish you had been there. Ms. Otto-Bernstein has performed heroic work."

Since 2006, Otto-Bernstein has completed several projects:

Otto-Bernstein is a founder of Film Manufacturers Inc.[ 15] , an international production company that develops, produces, and co-produces fiction and non-fiction entertainment. The company has offices in New York and Munich.[ 15]

Otto-Bernstein is married to New York art dealer Nathan A. Bernstein, with whom she has two children.[ 16] She is currently the chair of the Columbia University School of the Arts Dean's Council.[ 17]