Andreas Heinecke

Heinecke worked as a journalist and documentalist at a southwestern German radio station in the 1970s and 1980s. He later became an active Osher Fellow of the Exploratorium, a science and technology museum in San Francisco, from February to March 2019.

Social entrepreneurship

In 1988, Heinecke became deputy director of the Foundation for the Blind in Frankfurt, where he launched Dialogue in the Dark that same year. Since then, Dialogue in the Dark exhibitions and business workshops have been hosted worldwide and are established independently through a social franchise system.

Heinecke directed Dialogue in Silence in 1997, which was intended as a complementary experience to Dialogue in the Dark. Accompanied by hearing-impaired guides and trainers, participants are given noise-cancelling headphones and encouraged to explore various forms of non-verbal communication.

In 2009, Heinecke and 3 others founded Dialogue Social Enterprise GmbH. One of its three current programs is Dialogue with Time, with guides aged 70 or above. He and his wife Orna Cohen developed the interactive exhibition, which opened in Israel August 2012.