Carmen Romero will receive the Goethe Medal 2024 from the German government

The cultural manager Carmen Romero will receive the Goethe Medal 2024 from the German government, the Goethe-Institut reported this Wednesday.

Created in 1955, the Goethe Medal is the main recognition given by the Goethe-Institut as an official honorary award of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The candidates are proposed by all the Goethe-Institut headquarters in the world, in consensus with the respective Embassies, and only three people are selected each year by a specialized jury, on the basis of their cultural and political relevance and their outstanding artistic achievements. This award is considered the most important in Germany’s foreign cultural policy.

The winners

This 2024, the Goethe Medal will be awarded to Carmen Romero Quero (Chile), Claudia Cabrera (Mexico) and Iskra Geshoska (North Macedonia) in a ceremony that will take place on August 28, the birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , in the city of Weimar, Germany.

“It is an honor to receive this recognition from the Federal Republic of Germany, even more so in a year in which three women are the winners. “Positively impacting society through the performing arts, from early childhood to adulthood, provoking dialogue and reflection, is a responsibility and challenge that I share with this great global institution that is the Goethe-Institut,” he states. Carmen Romero about this ad.

For her part, the director of the Goethe-Institut Chile, Verena Lehmkuhl, comments: “Carmen Romero has had a great impact on Chilean cultural life. She has worked for decades with different key actors in world culture, and thanks to her work, Chilean audiences have been able to access international avant-garde shows. She and the Teatro a Mil Foundation are, without a doubt, very important partners for us, because we converge on the mission of bringing current and complex issues such as human rights, memory, inequality and migration to public discussion, without losing given the democratization of the arts.”

Given this, the German Ambassador, Irmgard Maria Fellner, points out that “the Goethe Medal is the most important award granted by the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of merits in the field of international cultural policy. The awarding of this well-deserved distinction to Carmen Romero underlines the importance of her cultural action in promoting the resilience of civil society and puts Chile in the focus of interest of different cultural institutions in Germany that want to maintain and develop relationships. with Latin America.”

Since the first award ceremony in 1955, a total of 380 personalities from 70 countries have been awarded, including Dogan Akhanlı, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Bourdieu, David Cornwell alias John le Carré, Princess Marilyn Douala Manga Bell, Elvira Espejo Ayca, Ernst Gombrich, Sofia Gubaidulina, Ágnes Heller, Wen Hui, Neil MacGregor, Ian McEwan, Ariane Mnouchkine, Tali Nates, Shirin Neshat, Sandbox Collective (Nimi Ravindran and Shiva Pathak), Irina Scherbakowa, Jorge Semprún, Antonio Skármeta, Yoko Tawada, Robert Wilson and Helen Wolff.

Romero, born in 1958 in La Calera, is a world leader in the field of cultural management in the performing arts. She is co-founder of the Teatro a Mil International Festival and the Teatro a Mil Foundation, a leading Chilean institution in the cultural field. With more than 30 years of history, the festival has presented theater, dance, performance and contemporary music of excellence, setting trends in Latin America and Europe.

Since 1994, Romero has been an activist defender of high-quality art accessible to all. In 2004, she co-created the aforementioned foundation, with the aim of expanding cultural capital in her country and democratizing access to the arts through training, dissemination and creation projects, promoting cultural networks for global collaboration. Her work has earned her notable international awards and recognition.

About the evaluation commission

Candidates are nominated by Goethe-Instituts around the world in consultation with German diplomatic missions abroad. Based on these nominations, the Goethe Medal Award Committee (jury of experts), composed of personalities from Germany’s science, art and culture, draws up a selection that is confirmed by the Executive Board of the Goethe-Institut.

The commission for the award of the Goethe Medal 2024 was made up of René Aguigah (presenter and director of the “Literature, Philosophy, Religion” department of Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Berlin), Olga Grjasnowa (writer, Vienna), Julia Grosse (Artistic Director Contemporary And , Berlin), Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck (Curator and Director of Berlinale Shorts, Berlin), Matthias Lilienthal (Playwright and Director, Munich/Berlin), Thomas Oberender (Author and Curator, Berlin), Antje Rávik Strubel (Author, Potsdam), Andrea Zschunke (Head of Music WDR3, Cologne); on behalf of the Federal Foreign Office Stefan Rössel (Delegate for Foreign Cultural Policy); representing the Goethe-Institut: Carola Lentz (President of the Goethe-Institut) and Johannes Ebert (General Secretary of the Goethe-Institut).