The Artists-in-Berlin Program is designed to offer its guests space for their creative work, promote the diversity and variety of artistic viewpoints, and strengthen the freedom of the arts and the written and spoken word.
The Foundation made an initial donation of three million US dollars and placed James B. Conant, former president of Harvard University and former United States Ambassador to Germany, in charge.
They include Jorge Castillo (1969), Daniel Spoerri (1973), Joel Fisher (1973), Gunter Christmann (1974), Richard Hamilton (1974), Duane Hanson (1974), Christian Boltanski (1975), Lawrence Weiner (1975), On Kawara (1976), Jannis Kounellis (1980), Nam June Paik (1983), Erwin Wurm (1987), Ilya Kabakov (1989), Nan Goldin (1991), Marina Abramović (1992), Rachel Whiteread (1992), Damien Hirst (1993), Andrea Zittel (1995), Pipilotti Rist (1996), Douglas Gordon (1997), Allan Sekula (1997), Rineke Dijkstra (1998), Steve McQueen (1999), Mark Wallinger (2001), Mona Hatoum (2003), Helen Mirra (2005), Shahzia Sikander (2007), Tim Lee (2009), Brandt Junceau (2010), and AA Bronson (2013).
They include the aforementioned Ingeborg Bachmann (1963), W. H. Auden (1964), Peter Handke (1968), Ernst Jandl (1970), George Tabori (1971), Lars Gustafsson (1972), Friederike Mayröcker (1973), Stanislaw Lem (1977), Gyorgy Konrad (1977), Margaret Atwood (1984), Gao Xingjian (1985), Carlos Fuentes (1988) Susan Sontag (1989), Cees Nooteboom (1989), Antonio Lobo Antunes (1989), [[Michael RosenzweigHarold Brodkey (1992), Vladimir Sorokin (1992), Imre Kertész (1993), Ryszard Kapuscinski (1994), Richard Ford (1997), Jeffery Eugenides (1999), Laszlo Vegel (2006), Svetlana Alexievich (2011), Liao Yiwu (2012), Erik Lindner (2012), and Lance Olsen (2015).
They include Iannis Xenakis (1963), Igor Stravinsky (1964), Isang Yun (1964), Krzysztof Penderecki (1968), Gyorgy Ligeti (1969), Morton Feldman (1971), John Cage (1972), Arvo Pärt (1981), Luigi Nono (1986), Michael Rosenzweig (1990), [La Monte Young]] (1992), Peter Machajdík (1992), Roberto Paci Dalò (1993), Nicolas Collins (1995), Olga Neuwirth (1996) and Giulio Castagnoli (1998).
105 filmmakers, such as Yvonne Rainer (1976), Istvan Szabo (1977), Andrei Tarkovsky (1985), Jim Jarmusch (1987), Alina Rudnizkaia (2011), Sebastián Lelio (2012) and Xiaolu Guo (2012) have also participated in the program.
As such, the program coordinators invited guest artists to city events, introduced them to influential figures in the German cultural scene, and ensured that they were able to publicly perform and display their work.