Barbara Kowa (born March 5, 1973, in Hanover) is an Austrian actress and performance artist.

Barbara Kowa grew up in Hamburg, where she initially completed a musical theater program at the Stage School of Dance and Drama before earning her diploma in acting from the "Ernst Busch" Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin in 1996. Even during her studies, she engaged intensively with performance art, collaborating with artists such as Nan Hoover. This was followed by international performances and projects in public spaces, as well as engagements as a dancer-actress in various stage and opera productions in Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo.

Alongside her work as an actress, Kowa increasingly developed her own multimedia performance and film projects. Her intensive engagement with film as an artistic medium began in the early 2000s with a poetic film she created about the gardens of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Her first feature film, *dreaming Mali*, was screened at international festivals and received multiple awards. Concurrently, she continued to work as a freelance actress, performing at venues such as the Renaissance-Theater Berlin and collaborating with directors including Mike Figgis and Tom DiCillo.

In 2013, she founded her own performance theater collective, which explores the intersections between performance art and theater. Thematically, her works frequently address subjects such as consciousness, communication, co-creativity, and life journeys. Kowa hails from a family of artists and intellectuals; she is, among others, the daughter of art historian Wieland Schmied.