Dr Flavia Frigeri appointed new Curatorial and Collections Director at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Dr Flavia Frigeri has been appointed Curatorial and Collections Director at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Dr Frigeri will take up this new role in April 2025, following the departure of Dr Alison Smith, who until June 2024 served as the National Portrait Gallery’s Chief Curator. As Curatorial and Collections Director, Dr Frigeri will oversee the Curatorial, Collections Management, Archive and Library departments, leading on acquisitions and commissions, Gallery displays and interpretation of the Collection from the Tudors to the present day.

Dr Frigeri is currently the CHANEL Curator for the Collection at the National Portrait Gallery, leading a major partnership project, supported by the CHANEL Culture Fund, aimed at redressing the gender imbalance within the NPG’s Collection through acquisitions, research and site-specific commissions. As part of Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, Dr Frigeri was instrumental in doubling the number of portraits of women on the walls of the NPG’s post-1900 galleries ahead of its reopening in June 2023.

Dr Frigeri’s previous roles have included Curator of International Art at Tate Modern and Lecturer on modern and contemporary art at UCL, London. She has recently guest curated the group exhibition Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950-1970 (2024) at Turner Contemporary in Margate and All Our Todays (2025), a survey of international contemporary art at MARe in Bucharest, Romania. Dr Frigeri is a widely published author, most recently she co-edited Women at Work: 1900 to Now (National Portrait Gallery, 2023) and a volume of collected essays New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021).

Dr Frigeri studied art history at the University of Chicago and John Cabot University, Rome and the holds a PhD in art history from UCL. She held the Hilla Rebay International Fellowship at the Guggenheim museums in New York, Bilbao and Venice and is a trustee for the Association for Art History (AAH).

Photo credit: Dr Flavia Frigeri by David Parry © David Parry.