Meet the Trustees
Chris Breward
CHAIR
Chris is Director of National Museums Scotland and is based in Edinburgh. Trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum, he has published and curated widely on the histories of fashion, style, masculinities and city life. Chris’s professional career has included roles across the art school, university and museum and galleries sector. He has worked at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Royal College of Art, London College of Fashion and Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh and before joining National Museums Scotland was Head of Research at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Director of Collection and Research at National Galleries Scotland. Chris has served on a number of Boards and Advisory Committees,
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Belinda Bowring
Belinda is Vice President of Communications, Arts at Endeavor, where she leads global strategy for Frieze, The Armory Show and EXPO CHICAGO. She has held senior roles at Frieze, Christie’s and Science Ltd, shaping the public voice of some of the most influential organisations in the contemporary art world.
Her work spans strategic messaging, media relations and thought leadership, with a focus on connecting artists, institutions and audiences internationally. She holds a BA and MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute and is based in London, with a wide network across Europe, the US and Asia.
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Flavia FrigerI
Flavia is the Curatorial and Collections Director at the National Portrait Gallery, London. From 2016 to 2020 she was a Teaching Fellow in the History of Art Department UCL and continues to be a longstanding member of faculty on Sotheby’s Institute’s MA in Contemporary Art. Previously she was ‘Curator, International Art’ at Tate Modern, where she co-curated The World Goes Pop (2015), and was responsible for Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013) and Ruins in Reverse (2013). As an independent curator, her recent curatorial work spans the globe including Evolutionary Travels the inaugural show of Fundación Arte in Buenos Aires in 2016. She is currently curating exhibitions for Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy.
DIONNE GRIFFITH
Dionne has a great amount of experience in strategy development, communications and marketing, and relationship building (with an extensive list of international, high-profile organisations and individuals in the cultural and corporate sectors). She is presently the director of marketing and partnerships for a global network of architecture practices, was previously Head of Communications for David Chipperfield’s firm, and was Business Director/Communications Director for United Visual Artists and for David Adjaye’s firm. Dionne studied art history (and English) at the University of Leeds for her BA and as part of an MA at the University of London Institute of Paris.
halle o’neal
Halle is a Reader in Japanese art in the History of Art department and Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She served as chair of The Art Bulletin until June 2025 and sits on the editorial board of Art in Translation. Her book, Word Embodied: The Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas in Japanese Buddhist Art (Harvard Asia Center Press 2018), explored the intersections of word and image and relics and reliquaries, as well as the performativity and objecthood of Buddhist texts. Her recent edited volume, Reuse and Recycling in Japanese Visual and Material Cultures (Ars Orientalis 2023), examined the reuse, recycling, and repurposing of a diverse range of objects across Japanese history. O’Neal was a recent recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and an ACLS Ho Family Foundation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, during which time she researched her forthcoming monograph, Dead Letters: Reuse, Recycling, and Mourning in Japanese Buddhist Manuscripts (Harvard Asia Center Press 2026). In her role as Schools Outreach Director for the Edinburgh Centre for Buddhist Studies, she offers sessions for primary and secondary pupils and CPD training days for Scottish high school teachers on Buddhism and Buddhist art.
Andrew Patrizio
Andrew holds the established Chair of Scottish Visual Culture in the School of History of Art at at Edinburgh College of Art/University of Edinburgh. He joined ECA in 1997 as Director of Research. He teaches and writes on Scottish post-1945 art and on ecocritical art history, practices, politics and methods. He led the adoption of a new Arts, Culture and Heritage Policy for the Scottish Green Party and is part of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network. Prior to and alongside his academic career, he has had curatorial posts at the Hayward Gallery, London, Glasgow Museums and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. He is currently on the Little Sparta Trust (Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden), the editorial board of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and the Journal for Scottish Society for Art History, and is a founding member of the European Forum for Advanced Practices.
PAULA SANKOFF
Paula is a senior sales director at Victoria Miro Gallery. Forging relationships with collectors, curators and art market professionals, she has built connections across the industry, working closely with artists and artist’s estates. Alongside her role in the contemporary art market, she has contributed to catalogues for exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Bonnefanten Museum, and the VCUarts Anderson Gallery at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as well as to publications such as Artforum and the Burlington Magazine. She co-edited two anthologies of artist’s writings (Dan Flavin and Carl Andre) published by Thames & Hudson and has served as a guest lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She holds a PhD and MA from the Courtauld, and is a member of the Courtauld Association Committee.
Annabelle Scholar
Annabelle is a Senior Client Advisor and Director in the UK Chairman’s Office at Christie’s. Since joining the company in 2016, she has advised a number of international private collectors and cultural advisors across categories, while nurturing new buyers and developing strategic partnerships.
During her time at Christie’s to date, she has notably placed artworks by Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin, Jean Dubuffet, Vincent van Gogh and Joan Miro among others into private collections. Annabelle has been instrumental in engaging with the next generation of collectors, including being part of the team who launched and delivered the Christie’s Lates’ platform which attracted over 1000 visitors each month, and which still runs today.
In 2022, Annabelle co-curated a cross-category exhibition, The Art of Literature, which brought together three millennia of artworks, objects and manuscripts exploring how they inspired and informed one another and in partnership with Molly Goddard. To coincide with this exhibition, Annabelle organised and hosted a dinner bringing together young patron groups from across London’s most important museums and institutions in a celebration of London as a cultural hub.
As well as advising clients, Annabelle has worked on a number of meaningful charitable auctions at Christie’s including Rays of Sunshine which raised £2.2m for children who are terminally ill or have life limiting diseases, Studio Voltaire’s 30th Anniversary ‘XXX’ auction and dinner and a private selling exhibition in support of New Contemporaries, supporting emerging talent and public programming. She has served on the committee for the Serpentine Future Contemporaries since 2021.
SHIKA SONI
Shika has a legal background with experience in governance and EDI, alongside a strong interest in art history. Shika is the Assistant General Counsel for EMEA at Principal Global Investors (PGI), overseeing the legal and company secretarial activities of nine regulated companies. Prior to PGI, Shika spent seven years managing the legal workforce at Royal London Asset Management. Shika chairs the Diversity & Inclusion Committee in Europe and its Global Women in Leadership initiative at PGI. Shika is a mentor for Upreach, a charity that assists young members of society who come from challenging socio-economic backgrounds to achieve career success in the City of London.
MICHAEL WHITE
Michael is a professor at the University of York, where he served as Deputy and then Head of the History of Art Department from 2011-2020. His principle area of expertise is the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, on which he has published extensively, particularly on groups such as the Dadaists and the De Stijl artists active in the Netherlands at the end of the First World War. Alongside his scholarship, Michael has curated exhibitions at Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool, and advised the Kunstmuseum Den Haag on the display of its permanent collection. Since 2014, he has been developing collaborative teaching at York in the area of Art Law, which is the subject of his latest research projects. He is especially interested in the intersection of art history with subjects outside of the humanities.
Stephen WHITEman
Stephen is Reader in the Art and Architecture of China at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where his research and teaching explore the visual and spatial cultures of early modern and modern East and Southeast Asia. He is author and editor of eight volumes, as well as articles on landscape studies, digital art history, and art historiography, among other subjects. Current projects include a multi-volume history of Asian art and several ongoing digital projects exploring landscape history and experience in China and Southeast Asia. Stephen has taught at the University of Sydney, the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont. He has served in a wide range of leadership and governance positions for institutions in the UK, the US, and Australia.