Onno Schilstra is an artist, writer, and musician, living alternately in Amsterdam and Berlin. He studied Art History at Leiden University from 1980 to 1987 and Fine Art at the KABK from 1989 to 1993. He worked for local and national newspapers as an art critic for over 10 years and until today has edited several art-related magazines. Currently, he writes a book of essays on art, to be published in 2020.
From 1992 to 1998, he teamed up with Allart Lakke as an artist duo, working within a broad range of media on the thematic of iconoclasm. From 1998 he developed a method for making stereoscopic drawings. These formed a starting point for a new collaboration in 2005, when he and his wife Wim Hardeman started working on Panopticum Berlin, a small traveling museum with panoramic drawings of everything that makes humans beautiful and horrible. Onno's art projects have been exhibited in museums, galleries and art fairs all over Europe.
From his 15th year, Onno has played guitar in rock bands, regularly performing on the local music scene. In 2019, his band Art For Art's Sake released its first CD 'Tributaries'.
Onno has been a teacher of art theory at the KABK since 2000. From 2003 to 2017 he was a coordinator of the Fine Art department. He is an enthusiastic participant in the KABK Theory Platform, contributing to a series of its publications on art theory teaching, searching to bridge the gap between art theory and -practice.