Martin Rauchbauer
Executive Director
Martin Rauchbauer has been leading several cultural and diplomatic institutions around the world, including the Austrian Cultural Forums in New York and Mexico City, NYU’s Deutsches Haus (including a resident artists program), as well as Open Austria which he founded in 2016 as the official Austrian representation in San Francisco. As a diplomat he served as the Austrian Consul in San Francisco, Dean of the San Francisco Consular Corps, and was appointed Austria’s first Tech Ambassador in Silicon Valley. During his time in the Bay Area, Martin shaped the emerging field of tech diplomacy, engaged in transatlantic digital diplomacy and digital human rights. He also worked on the intersection of art, tech, and diplomacy and initiated several collaborations with San Francisco art organizations. Over the last years, he also developed digital humanism as a strategic focus of Austrian cultural diplomacy. Martin initiated Open Austria’s “Art + Tech Lab”, and co-founded the European art + tech + policy initiative “The Grid”. Since 2022, he is a Berggruen Fellow on Global Governance of Technology, and a DiploFoundation Fellow on Tech Diplomacy. He has been serving in several art juries, including for the Festival Ars Electronica, the Creative Capital Award, and the Longtime Cybersecurity Award for Artistic Projects at UC Berkeley. Martin has been an invited speaker at several conferences and festivals around the world, including the Festival Ars Electronica and SXSW. In 2023, he co-founded the Tech Diplomacy Network with the World Economic Forum in San Francisco.
Martin studied philosophy and literature at the University of Vienna, and international relations at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. Martin was born and raised in Vienna, Austria and lived in the United States for a combined time of almost 15 years. He is married to Lucina Di Meco, a leading expert in the US on gendered disinformation and girls education. Together, they have a 12-year old son, Nazzareno, who was born in New York, and goes to school in San Francisco.