Tamara Loewenstein is a curator & cultural organizer based in San Francisco.
Tamara Loewenstein (she/her) has worked at the intersection between the arts, education and social justice for more than a decade. Her practice weaves together history, identity, and political activism. Her recent work takes up the intersections between memory culture and Jewish futurism and empowerment. She currently serves as Program Curator for arts and culture at the Goethe-Institut San Francisco.
During her six years based in Germany, Loewenstein worked at the intersection of Holocaust memory culture and Jewish futurism and empowerment, teaching courses on memory culture from a critical and future-oriented perspective and on Postmemory and the Holocaust through the lens of second- and third-generation artists. She has curated projects, organized panels, written, and given public talks on these intersections.
Loewenstein’s project Die nächsten 1700 Jahre: Queer Jewish Futures engaged with a reimagined Jewish future in the German context. Through a series of conversations, the project sought to engage in a critical and overdue dialogue with queer and Jewish artists, activists, and writers throughout Germany and across the diaspora.
Her collaboration with Renée Adele Grothkopf — prideuntold — was in partnership with KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme where their research-based, one-week Instagram Takeover of the memorial’s account sought to expand the dialogue on queer history under National Socialism.
The three-part film and lecture series, Berlin: In(flux), was organized by Loewenstein at the San Francisco Art Institute. The series took up conversations around contemporary immigration and refugee experiences through film and artist projects, using Berlin as a case study.
Loewenstein has organized exhibitions and public programs in venues throughout San Francisco including the African American Arts & Culture Complex, Galleria de la Raza, Manresa Gallery, Million Fishes Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, The Spare Room Project, and Queens Nails Annex. She served as the curatorial consultant in the founding of the gallery at Ruth's Table, an exhibition space at Bethany Center Senior Housing in honor of artist Ruth Asawa and worked as the Curator + Community Arts Organizer of the Urban Share Community Gardening Project. In commemoration of the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, she commissioned and organized a large-scale public projection by artist Ben Wood at the University of San Francisco.
She received a MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the New College of California.