September 16, 2016

Derek Gillman has joined the Westphal faculty as a Distinguished Teaching Professor. This esteemed scholar, museum leader, and leading art world figure will teach for both the Art History major and our graduate program in Museum Leadership. Mr. Gillman was the Executive Director and President of the Barnes Foundation, where he stewarded the celebrated collection to its acclaimed new home on the Parkway. Prior to the Barnes, he was President and Director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA); Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; and Keeper (Director) of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA) at the University of East Anglia. In addition to his leadership of the construction of the Barnes, he was responsible for overseeing new buildings at PAFA and the SCVA (the latter featuring as the new headquarters of the Avengers in recent Marvel movies). More recently, he was Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s Auction House, New York.

He was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Chinese Studies, after which he spent a year at the Beijing Languages Institute. From 1977-81 he worked as a specialist in the Chinese department at Christie’s King Street, before moving to the British Museum as Research Assistant for Chinese art. Derek Gillman is author of The Idea of Cultural Heritage (rev. 2^nd edition), Cambridge University Press. He is a board member of the International Cultural Property Society, serving as President from 2008-2014; a longstanding member of the Association of Art Museum Directors; and Consulting Scholar for Asia to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 2013 he was Marina Kellen French Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.