Rosa Barba was born in 1972 in Agrigento, Italy. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
She studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and has completed her PhD with the title On the Anarchic Organisation of Cinematic Spaces: Evoking Spaces beyond Cinema at the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University in 2018. She has been a visiting professor at MIT, ACT (Program in Art, Culture and Technology), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Barba holds a professorship in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts, Bremen.
Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions including: Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku (2020); ARTER, Istanbul (2019); CCA Kitakyushu (2019); Armory Park Avenue, New York (2019); Kunsthalle Bremen (2018); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2017); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017); Vienna Secession (2017); Malmö Konsthall (2017); CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016); Albertinum, Dresden (2015), and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2015).