Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat

Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat (born 2 August 1946) is an Austrian art historian. She was born in Caracas, Venezuela to a family of wealthy, Jewish textile manufacturers from Brno, who had fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II. When the war ended, the family unsuccessfully attempted to reclaim their property in Czechoslovakia and settled in St. Gallen, Switzerland in 1950. Influenced by her mother's love of art, Hammer-Tugendhat studied art history and archeology at the University of Bern and the University of Vienna. After completing her PhD in 1975, she taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna until her retirement in 2012.

From the early 1980s, Hammer-Tugendhat focused on representations of gender in art and analysis of the underlying socio-political meanings women represented in artworks. She gave lectures for the working group on women's history at the University of Vienna in the 1980s and attempted with other academics to launch a graduate-level women's studies program there in 1994. She also led an initiative "Förderung der Frauenforschung und ihrer Verankerung in der Lehre" ("Promotion of Women's Research and Its Anchorage in Teaching") in 1991, which successfully established coordination offices between Austrian universities to link women's studies researchers and created positions for women in the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research. In recognition of her work as a pioneer in the history of feminist art, she was awarded the Gabriele Possanner State Prize of 2009.