Yana Peel

Yana Peel is CEO of the Serpentine Galleries, the public arts institution championing excellence and experimentation across art, architecture and design. She is also chair of Intelligence Squared Group, a leading global forum for live debate, and co-founder of Outset Contemporary Art Fund. Peel’s board and advisory positions include: Tate International Council, British Fashion Council, V-A-C Foundation (Moscow) and Para Site Art Space (Hong Kong).

Peel is a young global leader of the World Economic Forum, a crown fellow of the Aspen Institute and creator of best-selling children’s books to benefit the NSPCC. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, attended McGill University and completed a post-graduate degree in Economics at LSE before starting her career at Goldman Sachs. She was honoured for her contribution to the arts at the Harper’s Bazaar Women of the Year Awards, 2017.

Kate Bryan

Kate Bryan is an arts broadcaster and head of collections for Soho House & Co globally. As well as being the custodian of the 4000-strong Soho House art collection, Bryan builds new collections for sites across the world, including Mumbai, Hong Kong, Paris and Downtown LA. She recently unveiled the new collection at the original Soho House at 40 Greek Street, featuring new initiatives such as 40-40-40, a platform for young artists, and Walk the Line, where she invited museum-level artists such as Tracey Emin and Yinka Shonibare to engage in a surrealist game to create single-line continuous drawings. In 2017 she unveiled The Vault 100 at The Ned London which presented the work of 93 women and seven men artists as an inversion of the current gender ratio of FTSE 100 CEOs.

She has written and presented television programmes for BBC, Sky Arts and Sky Arte Italia on an array of art historical subjects including Hogarth, Turner, Caravaggio, Dante, French Impressionism and Chinese art.  She is the lead presenter of The Art Show on Sky Arts and a judge on Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year and Landscape Artist of The Year. In March 2018 she presented an hour-long live TV special from Tate Modern giving viewers an exclusive tour of the exhibition ‘Picasso 1932’.

In addition to broadcasting, Bryan has experience working as a contemporary art dealer. In 2007 she left her position at the British Museum and relocated to Hong Kong to direct the Cat Street Gallery. Upon returning to London she was appointed as a director of the Fine Art Society, London’s oldest commercial dealership on New Bond Street. She later led the global contemporary art fair, Art15, in London. In 2014 she won the Arts and Culture category in the Women of the Future Awards and is now a mentor for young women in the arts.

Lisa Schiff

One of the leading and internationally recognized art advisors, Lisa Schiff has over a decade of experience building private collections and foundations.  As the founder and principal of SFA Art Advisory, she has offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London.

Lisa is ABD on her PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, CUNY.  She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Miami, Florida, and a BA in Art History and French from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She attended Columbia University’s Reid Hall in Paris where she wrote her senior thesis and completed one year of law school at the Faculté de Droit de Montpellier.  Additionally, she has taught as an adjunct professor of art history, lectures continually and sits on panels, and is regularly sought out for her opinion in the press.  Lisa has also curated exhibitions, has mounted several benefit auctions for the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, and consults on visual culture for the Foundation. She collaborated with Economic Theorist Jeremy Rifkin on an exhibition called ‘Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism’ and is planning another based on his theories of empathy. Finally, Lisa has produced special projects for artists such as Alex Israel and Doug Aitken and is currently working on a project in Miami at the Perez Art Museum.

Lisa co-founded VIA Art, a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting artistic production, thought leadership, and public engagement and currently sits on the board of directors of the Swiss Institute.

Martina Batovic

Since January 2016 Martina Batovic has held the post of UK director at the Austrian auction house Dorotheum, based at its London showroom in St James’s Place. With more than 40 different departments, 600 auctions a year and over 100 experts, Dorotheum is one of the oldest and largest auction houses in operation today. Croatian-born Batovic is a specialist and an expert in her field, passionate about 20th-century modern and contemporary art – particularly of the post-war 1950s and 1960s period.

Batovic has advised clients internationally across building collections for over a decade, starting her career at a London-based art advisory, sourcing artworks for private and corporate clients, then moving on to become sales director in a prominent photography gallery in Mayfair. Following this, she joined a major international auction house as a contemporary specialist in the post-war and contemporary department, covering auctions across London, New York and Hong Kong.

She is a keen advocate for female artists as well as an active member and patron of a number of arts organisations, educational initiatives and female-led groups. She is trilingual, holds an MA in art business and a double BA in art history and English language and literature. She currently lives with her family in south London.

Valeria Napoleone

Valeria Napoleone is an art collector and patron to a select number of arts organisations. She is a trustee of the Contemporary Art Society and head of the development committee at both Studio Voltaire and the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. She is also a member of the President’s Global Council at New York University and is an advisory board member of the Association of Women in the Arts. In addition, Napoleone launched SculptureCenter in September 2015 as a collaborative project that supports the production of a major artwork in a selected exhibition every 12 to 18 months at the New York-based non-profit dedicated to contemporary sculpture.

Valeria received a BA from New York University’s journalism school and an MA in art gallery administration at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Valeria’s collection focuses on female contemporary artists working internationally. Forming an exceptionally close bond with artists, Valeria has supported many of today’s most acclaimed artists at pivotal moments in their careers.

Image credit: Mathilde Agius

Sarah Maple

Sarah Maple is an award-winning visual artist known for her bold, brave, mischievous and occasionally controversial artworks that challenge notions of identity, religion and the status quo. Much of Maple’s inspiration originates from her Muslim upbringing, with parents of mixed religious and cultural backgrounds.

She completed a BA in Fine Art at Kingston University in 2007 and in the same year won the ‘4 New Sensations’ award for emerging artists, run by The Saatchi Gallery. Sarah’s artwork, films and performances have been exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions including Tate Britain, the A.I.R gallery in New York, AGO in Canada, the New Art Exchange in Nottingham, the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast and Kunisthoone in Estonia.

Sarah’s work has been the subject of documentaries including those for ARTE and VPRO. In 2015 she released a hardback art book of selected works titled ‘You Could Have Done This’. In 2017 she was invited to Tedx in Birmingham and gave a talk on the importance of free speech in ‘The Freedom To Be Challenged’.

In 2015, Sarah was awarded a Sky Academy Arts scholarship from Sky Arts which included funding, mentoring and a Sky Arts documentary. With the scholarship she exhibited a new body of work at New Art Exchange in August 2017. Maple lives and works in Sussex.

Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, but has been based mainly in London since the 1960s. Hiller carried out postgraduate work at Tulane University in New Orleans with a National Science Foundation fellowship in anthropology, but after conducting fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, she became uncomfortable with academic anthropology’s claim to objectivity. She made the decision to leave anthropology to become an artist.

Hiller started with paintings and collaborative ‘group investigations’ and moved on to audio and visual technology. Her groundbreaking installations – multi-screen videos and audio works – are based on specific cultural artefacts from our society, which she uses as basic materials. Many of her works explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of automatic writing, near-death-experiences, and collective experiences of unconscious, subconscious and paranormal activity.

With a practice extending over 40 years, Susan Hiller is considered one of the most influential artists of her generation.  Her work is found internationally in both private and public collections and her career has been recognised by mid-career survey exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (in 1986) and Tate Liverpool (in 1996), and most recently in 2011 by a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain.

Annie Kevans

Since graduating from Central St Martins, where Charles Saatchi bought her series of 30 paintings of dictators as young boys (‘Boys’), Kevans has had solo exhibitions in London, New York, Vienna, San Francisco, Antwerp and Edinburgh. She has exhibited in group shows at leading galleries and museums including the Barbican Art Gallery, the Royal Academy and the Saatchi Gallery. Her work can also be found in major private and public collections.

Kevans recently collaborated with Jean Paul Gaultier to produce a succession of 32 paintings depicting his muses, including Kate Moss, Madonna, David Bowie and Amy Winehouse. She was a finalist in both the Women of the Future awards and for the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

Kevans’ paintings reflect her interest in power, manipulation and the role of the individual in inherited belief systems. She looks at alternative histories and how they relate to current issues to create what she describes as ‘anti-portraits’ that may or may not be based on real documentation. Having an affinity for the marginalised, Kevans paints figures overlooked, exploited, or objectified within the context of history or contemporary culture, imbuing her subjects with tangible humanity and sensuality.

Susanna Brown

Susanna Brown has been curator of photographs at the V&A since 2008 and has produced international touring exhibitions and books on 20th century and contemporary subjects including Horst: Photographer of Style, ‘Selling Dreams: One Hundred Years of Fashion Photography’, Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton, and is currently working on the forthcoming exhibition ‘Tim Walker’ (opening September 2019).

Her research interests span documentary photography, portraiture and fashion image-making, and she has contributed to recent V&A publications on Vivien Leigh, Alexander McQueen, and Mary Quant (published April 2019). For the V&A Photography Centre, which opens on 12 October 2018, Susanna has selected objects from the museum’s collection ranging from the 1920s to 1990s.

Catherine Troiano

Catherine Troiano is curator of photographs at the V&A. She joined the team as assistant curator in 2015, having worked at cultural institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent shows she has curated or contributed to include: ‘Abstraction Measured’ (Filter Photography Festival, 2015); ‘Street View: Photographs of Urban Life’ (Museums Sheffield, 2016); and, at the V&A, ‘The Camera Exposed’ and ‘Into the Woods: Trees in Photography’.

Her main area of expertise is Central and Eastern European photography and her latest published text features in Photography & Culture (forthcoming). She is pursuing her PhD at De Montfort University’s Photographic History Research Centre. For the V&A Photography Centre, which opens on 12 October 2018, Catherine was responsible for selecting objects from the museum’s collection of photographic technology. She also selected photographs for slideshow projections.

Helena Lee

Helena Lee is the features director of Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country. She is responsible for the programming of Bazaar Art Week, edits the annual magazine Bazaar Art, which celebrates women in the art world, and Bazaar’s art and culture coverage, commissioning award-winning writers and artists such as Margaret Atwood and Tracey Emin.

She recently launched Bazaar’s inaugural literary salon at the Ned, featuring Ali Smith, Jessie Burton and Elif Shafak and spearheaded the yearlong cultural celebrations for the magazine’s 150th anniversary. She has also written for The Times, City AM, The Telegraph and Condé Nast Traveler.

Frances Hedges

Frances Hedges is the associate editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country, specialising in the visual arts. Her previous roles have included the editorship of the journal for the Royal Society of Arts and a stint as the digital editor for Elle Decoration. Frances is a guest curator for the ‘ING Discerning Eye’ exhibition, held this November at Mall Galleries, and is on the jury for the international Black & White Spider Awards for photography.