Derek Gillman has held the position of President, CEO and the Edna S. Tuttleman
Director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts since the beginning of 2001.
He came to the Academy in June 1999 as Executive Director and Provost. From 1995
to 1999, Mr. Gillman served as Deputy Director of the National Gallery of
Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, Australia's principal encyclopedic art museum, where
he was responsible both for the international and Australian collections. For
the previous ten years he was Keeper (equivalent to Director) of the Sainsbury
Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, which holds the Robert
and Lisa Sainsbury Collection of antiquities, non-western and modern western
art. He began his museum career in 1981 at the British Museum, where he was a
curator in the Department of Oriental Antiquities. Prior to that he worked for
four years at Christie's London as a specialist in Chinese art, following a year
spent at the Beijing Languages Institute on a British Council scholarship.
He was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he first
read Philosophy and Experimental Psychology, and then Chinese Studies, and holds
a Master of Laws degree by research from the University of East Anglia. In
1991, he participated in the Getty Trust Museum Management Institute (MMI)
course at U.C. Berkeley, and in 2004 the Strategic Perspectives in Non-Profit
Management program at the Harvard Business School. From 1998-2003 he was a
Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He has published and taught in
the fields of Chinese art, and museum and heritage studies. His book The Idea
of Cultural Heritage is published this month by the Institute of Art and Law
(UK).
Among the committees on which he has served are the Board of the School of World
Art Studies and Music at the University of East Anglia (1985-95), and the
governing Board of the Norfolk Institute of Art and Design (from 1990-95).
In Philadelphia he serves on the Boards of the Avenue of the Arts and the
Parkway Council Foundation. He is also on the Board of the Association of
Independent Colleges of Art and Design and a member of the Association of Art
Museum Directors.
Mr. Gillman has been intimately involved with four significant building
projects: an extension to the Sainsbury Centre undertaken by its original
architect, Norman Foster; two buildings in Melbourne - a renovation of the
National Gallery of Victoria by Mario Bellini (now the NGV International),
and a new museum for the NGV's Australian collections (now the NGV Australia)
designed by the London practice Lab Architecture; and the new 270,000 sq. ft.
Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building at the Pennsylvania Academy designed by
Dagit-Saylor. Combining public galleries, classrooms and studios, the
Hamilton Building first opened to students in fall 2003, and to the public in
January 2005.
During his time in Philadelphia, significant works have been added to the
Academy's collection by Eakins, Whistler, Gottlieb, Krasner, Neel,
Frankenthaler, Golub, Westermann, Nutt and Ryman, and also major works from the
Vivian and Meyer Potamkin Collection. Other achievements include overseeing
the American Sublime and In Private Hands exhibition projects;
renovating the
historic galleries; publishing Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: 200 Years
of Excellence (2004); completing the 200th Anniversary celebrations; initiating
an exchange relationship with the China Academy of Art; and, in November 2005,
receiving the National Medal of Arts on behalf of the Academy from President
Bush.
He is married to Yael Hirsch and has three children.
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300 North Latch's Lane
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