Werner Kraus, born 1944, studied civil engineering in Munich and worked for some years as an engineer in Thailand and Sumatra. Went back to university in 1973 and studied at the South Asian Institut in Heidelberg and at the Modern Southeast Asia Program/Cornell University Ithaca N.Y. anthropology and history of Southeast Asia. 1983 he left university with a doctoral degree of the Fakultät für Orientalistik und Altertumskunde, University of Heidelberg. He was co-founder of the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at Passau University and taught at a number of European and Asian universities. After concentrating for some years on the mystic dimension of Islam in SEA, he finally switched to his long time interest: art in Southeast Asia. Since a number of years he is the director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Art, a privately organized documentation and research institution. Presently he organizes the first exhibition of the works of Raden Saleh Bustaman (1811-1880), the Javanese painter who introduced western academic art to Indonesia. The show will be shown in Jakarta in February 2012. (source)