Steven Walter is an award-winning music curator and cultural manager. He grew up near Stuttgart as part of an American family in Germany, with a few interludes in the USA. He studied cello in Oslo and Detmold and cultural management in Hamburg. In 2009, he founded PODIUM Esslingen and developed it into an award-winning platform for new concert formats. He has been the director of the Beethovenfest Bonn since 2021.

During his fellowship at the Thomas Mann House, Steven Walter is investigating the contemporary art music scene in the USA in a transatlantic context. What can the German art music scene in particular learn from American developments?


Selected Awards

2017 | classical:NEXT Innovation Award
2013–2015 | Scholarship holder “Akademie Musiktheater heute” of the Deutsche Bank Foundation
2011 | Cultural Manager of the Year
2010 | ECHO Klassik – German Music Award
2011 & 2019 | Opus Klassik (Special prize for the Promotion of Young Talents, and Prize for “Innovative Concert of the Year”)


Selected Publications

2021 | “A Manifesto of Concert Culture,“ in Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance, edited by Martin Tröndle. Milton Park: Routledge.