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All Pictures (2)Biography
Claudia Schmid was born in Cologne in 1956. From 1976 to 1978, she studied music in Vienna, aiming for a career as a flute player. In 1978, she enrolled at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst, and after for years transferred to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she studied painting, sculpting and concept art under the supervision of Gerhard Hoehme, Jürgen Partenheimer und Fritz Schwegler. After graduating in 1986, she began working as a self-employed artist and presented her works in several international exhibitions.
Since 1991, Claudia Schmid freelances as director an author for TV stations WDR, Arte and 3sat. She has completed about 15 TV features on art, and in 2003, her film "Liebesversuche – Portrait Werner Schroeter" was awarded the first prize at the Festival International du Film d'Art in Paris. The 2010 documentary "Die Stille der Unschuld – Der Künstler Gottfried Helnwein" was Schmid's first cinema release, which she followed with a TV portrait of Heinz Emigholz. "Die gezeichnete Welt – Der Künstler Heinz Emigholz" premiered in 2010 at the Kunstverein Ingolstadt and aired on German television later that year.
Schmid followed with another artist portrait, "Richard Deacon - In Between", which was released in 2013. Already in 2012, she began production on the documentary "Voices of Violence" as the first part of a planned trilogy of films about worldwide male violence against women. "Voices of Violence" portrays female villagers who were raped by rebel soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After four years of work, the film was released in March 2016. One year later, the second film of the trilogy premiered: In "Unter aller Augen" ("For All the World to See") female victims of violence from Asia, Africa and Europe tell their stories.