Professor Uwe Fleckner studied art history, philosophy, and German at Bochum and Hamburg, gaining his PhD in 1991 with a thesis on the portraits of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. From 1997 to 2002 he was deputy director of the German Forum for Art History in Paris (DFK Paris), and from 2002 to 2004 deputy professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2004, Fleckner has been professor of art history at the University of Hamburg and director of the Warburg Haus. Furthermore, he has co-edited the collected works of Carl Einstein and Aby Warburg, and written numerous publications on the art of the 18th century to the present day.

Prof. Dr. Birgit Recki studied philosophy and sociology in Düsseldorf and Münster. In 1984, she completed her doctoral thesis on Aura und Autonomie: zur Subjektivität der Kunst bei Walter Benjamin und Theodor W. Adorno and in 1995 attained the postdoctoral habilitation (dr. habil.) with the thesis Ästhetik der Sitten: die Affinität von ästhetischem Gefühl und praktischer Vernunft bei Kant at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Since 1997, she has been professor of philosophy at Universität Hamburg, specializing in ethics, aesthetics, anthropology and cultural philosophy. From 1997 to 2007, Recki managed the Ernst Cassirer Centre at the Warburg Haus, and since 2006 has been the chair of the Internationale Ernst Cassirer Gesellschaft. From 2011 to 2015, she served as president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik. In 2011, she was awarded a fellowship by the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald, and in 2013 was a visiting professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. She has been a director at the Warburg Haus since 2014.