Born in 1950 in Göttingen, Germany, Gerhard Steidl founded his publishing house and screen-printing workshop for graphic art and posters in 1968. Today Steidl publishes the largest worldwide program of contemporary photobooks and an ambitious German literature list. He furthermore conceives and curates international exhibitions. In 2020 Steidl became the first non-photographer to receive the Outstanding Contribution to Photography prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, and was awarded the Gutenberg Prize by the International Gutenberg Society in Mainz. In 2021 he received the Grand Cross of Merit of Lower Saxony, and the publishing house received the Deutscher Verlagspreis (German Publishers Award). Steidl is the initiator and founding director of Kunsthaus Göttingen, which opened in June 2021, and curator of the documenta fifteen partner project “printing futures”.