Luit Bieringa is a New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

 art historian and museum consultant.

Bieringa held the position of Director at the Manawatu Art gallery from 1971 until 1979, when he was appointed as Director of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand. He held this position until 1989. He is a champion of photography in New Zealand

Photography in New Zealand

New Zealand photography began in the mid-19th century when photographers first documented the country's natural beauty and people. Alfred Burton, of the Dunedin Burton Brothers, also travelled through many of the Pacific islands near New Zealand with the P&O Shipping line, in the early days of...

, promoting it on a national level with major exhibitions at the National Art Gallery during his directorship, including NZ surveys and retrospectives of the photography of Peter Black

Peter Black

Peter Black may refer to:*Peter Black *Peter Black...

, Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed...

, Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...

 and Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach is an American photographer known for his photographs of human intervention in landscapes. His works are represented in more than fifty major museum collections around the world....

.

In 2006, he made a documentary about photographer Ans Westra

Ans Westra

Ans Westra, CNZM is a self-taught New Zealand photographer, with an interest in Māori, whose prominence as an artist and author was most amplified by her 1964 piece Washday at the pa....

.