Barbara Boekelman is a New Zealand-based artist from Amsterdam. After attending art school in the Netherlands in the late 1980s, she spent over two decades working in broadcasting before returning fully to painting and completing her MFA at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

She now works full-time as an artist, creating large-scale, layered works that build through repetition, concealment, and reworking. Her paintings explore contradiction rather than resolution, holding uneasy social, historical, personal and institutional themes beneath vivid, intricate surfaces where figuration drifts toward abstraction.

Her work has been exhibited in New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Germany, including being a finalist and prize recipient in the BBA Artist Prize in Berlin. She lives and works in Christchurch, New Zealand.