Our Board of Trustees

Karen Alexander

Karen Alexander is currently a senior tutor in the RCA's Curating Contemporary Art department with responsibility for the work-based pathway (Inspire). Prior to that she worked as a film curator and freelance consultant on film exhibition and distribution. She has contributed to several books on film including British Cinema of the 90s (London: British Film Institute, 1997) Women and Film: Sight & Sound Reader (London: British Film Institute 1999), and If Looks Could Kill (London: Koenig Books and Fashion in Film Festival, 2008). From 1998 - 2006 she worked at the British Film Institute, with responsibility for the strategic marketing of BFI Distribution and Archive cinema releases.

Clio Barnard

Clio Barnard is an artist filmmaker whose work has shown in cinemas, festivals and galleries internationally. Her work is concerned with the relationship between fictional film language and documentary. She has often dislocated sound and image by constructing fictional images around verbatim audio. In her multiple award-winning Artangel commission The Arbor, actors lip-synch to the voices of real people, questioning documentary’s aspiration to collapse the distance between reality and representation. Other films include: Plotlands (Whitstable Biennale), Road Race (Film London), Random Acts of Intimacy (BFI/Channel 4) and Headcase (Arts Council England / Channel 4).

Paul Bennun

Paul Bennun is co-owner and a Director of Somethin' Else, a leading cross-platform production company based in London. He has been a game designer, entertainment producer and broadcaster and artistic collaborator. Somethin' Else is a digital content producer which is also the largest radio independent, a TV entertainment indie and a major interactive content producer, in which it has been active for over a decade. Paul leads the Company's digital strategy and development and future product strategy. He holds internationally recognised awards in games, radio, mobile technology and interactive broadcasting such as Bafta Awards, Sony Radio Academy Awards and the GSM Association Awards. A trustee of also of Longplayer Trust, he co-authored the British Government's recent report on the future of digital music, and has collaborated with practitioners including John Berger, Theatre de Complicite and Rotozaza. Paul also presents science, technology and usability programmes for the BBC.

Brian Boylan

Brian Boylan has been involved in contemporary art for more than 30 years, as a collector, as a director of Nigel Greenwood gallery, one of Londons leading galleries in the 70s and 80s, as a member of Whitechapel Gallery Board and Tate Modern Council and as a professional advisor to Tate, V&A, New Museum and Whitney [New York], Southbank [London],and AMOMA [Qatar]. Brian is Chairman of Wolff Olins, a specialist consultancy which advises both businesses and cultural institutions on how to make the most of their brands.

Jeremy Deller

Jeremy Deller is a celebrated British artist who makes politically and socially charged performance works. He was born in London and studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Deller was winner of the Turner Prize in 2004 for his installation Memory Bucket (2003) a documentary about Crawford, Texas the hometown of George W Bush and the siege in nearby Waco. He is best known for his historical reenactment of a violent British labour clash, his Artangel project The Battle of Orgreave (2001).

Ayelet Elstein

Ayelet Elstein is the Director of BFAMI, the British Friends of the Art Museums of Israel, a London based philanthropic art organisation with an international network of supporters and a strong link to prominent collectors and patrons of the arts worldwide. The key focus of the BFAMI fundraising endeavours is support of the educational programmes and acquisitions for the art museums in Israel. Ayelet previously had a successful career in the Enterprise Software business with roles spanning from technical to sales management delivering business growth in particular with large multinational corporations. She is an emerging collector and an avid supporter of contemporary dance.

Judith Greer

Currently Associate Director of International Programmes for the UAE based Sharjah Art Foundation, Judith Greer previously worked as International Director at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Along with her husband Richard she has been a collector and art patron since the late 1980's and in 2006 co-authored Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector's Handbook. She lectures internationally on the topics of collecting and arts patronage and was a juror for the 2007 Max Mara Prize for Women Artists and in 2009 on the jury for the Dubai-based Sheikha Manal Foundation Prize for young Emirati artists.

Oliver Haarmann

Oliver Haarmann is a Founding Partner of Searchlight Capital, a private investment firm with offices in London, New York, and Toronto. Among other Board roles, he serves as Chairman of Hunter Boot Ltd., a UK footwear & fashion company. Previously, Oliver enjoyed a successful career as a Partner at the global investment firm KKR & Co. A collector of contemporary art, he serves as an Honorary Trustee of Tate Foundation.

Harry Handelsman

Harry Handelsman is CEO of the Manhattan Loft Corporation. At the turn of 2000 Harry Handelsman was listed in Time Out’s ‘Power 100’, a directory of the “real rulers” of London, eight places ahead of the Queen. Early in the 1990s he had identified an untapped resource in the London property sector: the glut of industrial buildings due to the decline in the property market. Taking his inspiration from the SoHo district in New York, Handelsman brought the concept of loft-living to Londoners. From Manhattan Loft’s inception in 1992 Harry has always believed in the regeneration and revitalisation of inner London. Clerkenwell, Soho, Bankside, West India Quay and Spitafields are all examples of areas of London which have prospered from Harry’s vision.

Amanda Levete

Amanda Levete is a Stirling Prize winning architect and founder and principal of the international studio, AL_A. Since its formation in 2009, AL_A has made its mark with work of originality and integrity, where concepts push client ambitions, aesthetics and technologies to their limits. Commissions include the highly anticipated expansion of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a media campus for Sky, a cultural centre in Lisbon commissioned by EDP, and a 1.5 million sq ft luxury shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok. Formerly as a partner of Future Systems, Levete realised groundbreaking buildings including the Media Centre at Lord's Cricket Ground and Selfridges department store in Birmingham.

Levete is also a trustee of the Arts Foundation, and leading social innovation centre, the Young Foundation. She is a regular radio and TV broadcaster, writes for a number of publications including the New Statesman and Prospect and lectures throughout the world. She trained at the Architectural Association and worked for Richard Rogers before joining Future Systems in 1989.

Kaveh Sheibani

Kaveh Sheibani moved to London in November 1994 and worked until 1999 for Salomon Brothers where he was a Managing Director in its proprietary trading team prior to leaving to become a co-founder of Pendragon Capital, a London based fund manager. He is an avid supporter of the arts has been a trustee of Artangel since 2005.