Paul Bernard Holdengräber is an American interviewer, curator and writer. He was Director of New York Public Library 's Public Programming, most known for organizing literary conversations for the NYPL's public program series, LIVE from the NYPL, which he founded. Since February 2012, he has hosted The Paul Holdengräber Show on the Intelligent Channel on YouTube. He is founding Executive Director of The Onassis Foundation LA, a “center of dialogue” in Los Angeles, beginning in 2019.
Early life
Holdengräber was born in Houston, Texas, to father Kurt Holdengräber, and Erica Holdengräber. His parents were Austrian Jews with roots in Romania and Poland who fled Austria to Haiti during World War II. Holdengräber's father was originally a second year medical student who was expelled for being Jewish. Among a very small Jewish community of 107 families, Holdengräber's father grew vegetables and worked as a farmer in Haiti, where he met and married Holdengräber's mother. The family moved from Haiti to Mexico City, where his older sister was born. The family then moved from Mexico to Houston, and eventually settled in Brussels, Belgium. Holdengräber spent much of his youth hitchhiking around Europe. Holdengräber studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He received a bachelor's degree from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. In 1995, Holdengräber received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University. From 1995 to 1996, he did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute.
Holdengräber was the founder and director of the Institute for Arts and Culture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the idea "to challenge the perception that museums are nothing more than mausoleums for Old Masters". Under Holdengräber's direction, the institute became an active and lively forum for debate with its ambitious lecture series in which painters, poets, performers, writers and thinkers address critical cultural issues through lively talks, discussions and performances.
In 2004, the then NYPL President Paul LeClerc hired Holdengräber to create a public program at the New YorkPublic Library. Holdengräber founded LIVE from the NYPL, a conversation series with writers, musicians, filmmakers and artists. As the director of LIVE from the NYPL, Holdengräber interviewed hundreds of public personalities, including Patti Smith, Zadie Smith, Anish Kapoor, and Jay Z. He sees the New York Public Library as a storehouse of knowledge. One of his memorable series of conversations was with the German filmmaker, Werner Herzog. He has worked in partnership with such organizations as Rolex, The Moth, and PEN World Voices.
Holdengräber lives in the Los Angeles, California, suburb of Glendale with his wife, Barbara Holdengräber, a writer, and their two sons. He speaks four languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. In Brussels, he spoke French as well as Flemish.
