An art historian, author and curator, Dorothee Richter co-organised Curating Degree Zero - an international symposium on curating together with Barnaby Drabble at the GAK, Bremen in 1998. The event lead the two to initiate the Curating Degree Zero Archive in 2003.
Richter went on to organise numerous further symposiums; Dialogues and Debates ­ feminist positions in contemporary visual arts in 1999; The Quintessential Hold of Images in 2001 (with Sigrid Adorf and Kathrin Heinz), The Visuality of Theory vs. The Theory of the Visual in 2002 (with Nina Moentmann), Re-Visions of the Display: Exhibition Scenarios, Their Readings and Their Publics, at the Migros Museum in 2007 (with Jennifer John and Sigrid Schade), Community_ perhaps in 2010 (with Jörg Huber a. Elke Bippus), Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique? also in 2010, with Rein Wolfs at the Fridericianum Kassel.
She was director of the Lichthaus in Bremen and artistic director of the Kuenstlerhaus Bremen from 1999 to 2003, where she curated a series of year long exhibition and event programs including: overhigh - over flow, Naming a Practice and Collaboration ­ a practise which creates an environment.
She has lectured at the University of Bremen, the University of Lueneburg, Ècole des Beaux Arts in Genève, and the the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. She was an associate of the research project ‘Exhibition Displays’ at the University of Art and Design in Zurich, where, since 2005 she is Director of the Postgraduate Program in Curating and, with Susanne Clausen, programme director of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, a practice-based doctoral programme in cooperation with the Department of Art at the University of Reading.
She has frequently published articles on curatorial issues and alongside co-editing the publications Curating Degree Zero (1998) and Curating Critique (2008) she also iinitiated the web journal on-curating, which went online in 2008.