Derek Gillman

Derek Gillman is Distinguished Teaching Professor, Arts Administration and Museum Leadership, and Senior Adviser to the Drexel President for University Collections. He was an art museum leader for almost thirty years, on three continents, and has been involved in the construction and renovation of five museum buildings. Professor Gillman is author of The Idea of Cultural Heritage (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2010, Chinese translation, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics Press, 2018) and numerous articles on art and heritage, most recently ‘The Old Summer Palace and the Rhetoric of National Treasures’, Santander Art and Culture Law Review, vol. 5, no. 2, 2019; ‘Heritage, Value and Vulnerability’, Yichan (Heritage, Nanjing University Press), vol. 1, no. 1, 2019. He is currently co-editing, with Claire Finkelstein and Frederik Rosén, Culture and Value: The Preservation of Heritage in Times of War (Oxford University Press), which will include his chapter, “Preserving valuable objects and sites, in times of war and at other times.” From 2006 to 2013, Derek Gillman was Executive Director and President of the Barnes Foundation, stewarding the collection to its new home in central Philadelphia. Albert Barnes assembled the world’s greatest holding of Cézanne paintings and among the most important of Renoir, Matisse, early Picasso, Modigliani and Soutine. In 2014 he became Distinguished Visiting Professor at Drexel, and then in 2015 joined Christie’s, New York, as Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art. In 2016 he returned to Drexel as Distinguished Teaching Professor. Mr. Gillman is a member of the board of the International Cultural Property Society, serving as president from 2008-14, and of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. He is a longstanding member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and a consulting scholar in the Asian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. In 2013 he was Marina Kellen French Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.