Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. Dreyblatt is the Vice-Director of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and was Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany from 2009 to 2022. He studied Media Art with Woody and Steina Vasulka and music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier.
His artistic practice over the past 50 years has ranged from media installations, public artworks, and interactive artistic research projects. At the same time, he has continued to develop his unique work in composition and music performance.
In the early 1990s, Dreyblatt pioneered the use of hypertext as a form of non-linear text navigation in artistic practice. Beginning with the 1933 biographical dictionary Who’s Who in Central & East Europe, he developed a series of installation and performative works—based on innovative event scores—that explored archival memory through interactive, associative structures. These projects have since evolved to engage with other historical sources and materials, including PERFORMING the Black Mountain College ARCHIVE (2015) and Archive Carousel (2021), expanding his approach to include the performative activation of archival artifacts. This method of organizing text, documents, and history continues to inform his work to this day.
Dreyblatt’s artworks often explore themes of memory and history, and his engagement with archival materials is both a method and a subject of his creative practice. His work frequently involves the manipulation of archival documents, lists, and other historical artifacts, which he recontextualizes to highlight the layers of meaning embedded within them in multidimensional installations. In this way, Dreyblatt uncovers forgotten or overlooked histories, bringing them into contemporary dialogue. He creates visual and conceptual “maps” of memory, challenging viewers to reflect on how the past is recorded and how such records shape our understanding of both history and identity.
Dreyblatt has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, and public spaces such as the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; the Jewish Museum in New York; the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna; the Draiflessen Collection in Mettingen; and Gallery e/static in Turin. Permanent public artworks are on display at Königsplatz in Munich, the HL Holocaust Center in Oslo, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the Stasi Prison Memorial in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. He has co-curated exhibitions such as Terry Fox: Ephemeral Gestures at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, which has toured throughout Europe.
Dreyblatt has received numerous commissions and awards, including from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in New York, the ‘Förderpreis’ of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and a residency at the Center for Art, Science & Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
