Heinz Peter Schwerfel, born in 1954 in Cologne, is a filmmaker, art critic and curator, and founder and artistic director of KINO DER KUNST. His writings have appeared extensively in ARTMagazine, ZEITand Lettre International, and he has published several books on contemporary art, including interviews with Georg Baselitz, Jannis Kounellis and Markus Lüpertz (all Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne); essays such as ‘Kunst-Skandale’ and ‘Kunst nach Ground Zero’ (DuMont, Cologne); and an examination of the relationship between contemporary art and film (DuMont, Cologne). He has curated solo exhibitions devoted to Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Isaac Julien, Shirin Neshat and Julian Rosefeldt. He lives in Paris and Cologne.

Schwerfel’s award-winning film portraits about Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Anish Kapoor (all for Schuch Productions, Paris), or the Artcore produced Georg Baselitz, Rebecca Horn, Alex Katz, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce Nauman  etc  are regularly presented on television, in cinema retrospectives and in museums. An eight-film series he developed with Hans Ulrich Obrist for the broadcaster Arte and the Paris based production company Camera Lucida, covering time-based forms of art and exhibitions, has been aired in summer 2018. It features artists such as Marina Abramović, Joan Jonas, Philippe Parreno, Adrián Villar Rojas and Tino Sehgal.

In early 2020, Schwerfel filmed for ARTE /France and Schuch Productions l'opéra contemporaine "Fosse" de Boltanski/Kalman/Krawczyk, in autumn 2020 he directed for the Musée d'Orsay and Camera lucida a short film about the French artist Laurent Grasso. And he organized as artistic director the fourth edition of the artists' film festival KINO DER KUNST in Munich, an extravagant and unique project of his company Artcore Film.
His book 'After Cinema' was published in 2024 by Hatje Cantz, Berlin.