Stephan Koja

Stephan Koja (born 1962) is an Austrian art historian and museum director known for his scholarship on Gustav Klimt and European painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Educated in art history, classical archaeology and related disciplines at the universities of Salzburg and Vienna (and, in some accounts, also Innsbruck), he worked as a freelance curator before becoming curator and later head of the collections of 19th‑century and classical modern art at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna. In 2016 he was appointed director of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and the Skulpturensammlung (antique to 1800) at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and in 2023 he assumed the leadership of The Princely Collections, Vaduz–Vienna (Fürstliche Sammlungen Liechtenstein).

Koja is the author and editor of numerous monographs and exhibition catalogues on major artists including Raphael, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Bellotto, Klimt, Monet and Rodin. He wrote Gustav Klimt: Landscapes, a comprehensive study of Klimt’s landscape paintings first published by Prestel in 2002 and reissued in later editions, and he also authored Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze, a guide to Klimt’s important mural cycle in Vienna.[