Barbara Keidel was born in 1939 in Berlin. She studied at the University of the Fine Arts in West Berlin and was a master student under Ludwig Gabriel Schrieber. She received the Prize of the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft, West Berlin in 1965. In 1986 Keidel became a member of the Neue Gruppe in Munich. She received the Lithography Prize of the Society of Original Etching in Munich in 1996 and a year later the work­ing scholarship of Villa Waldberta, Feldafing. She taught at the Chinese-German Art Academy in Hangzhou (China) in 2008. Keidel died in Berlin in 2021.