Victoria Siddall Named Director of London’s National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery (NPG), London, has announced Victoria Siddall as its new director. She will be the first woman to helm the museum in its 168-year history. Siddall, the onetime global director of Frieze art fairs and until this month an NPG trustee, fills the post left vacant by art historian Nicholas Cullinan, who this past March was appointeddirectorof London’s beleaguered British Museum, after leading the gallery for nearly a decade. “Her strengths as a cultural leader are considerable,” said NPG board chair David Ross in a statement, in which he additionally noted that Siddall possessed the “vision and determination to build on [NPG’s] recent successes and lead the next stage of the gallery’s development.”

Siddall, who started her career working at Christie’s, joined Frieze in 2004, working in the development department. She inaugurated Frieze Masters for the brand in 2012 and was named global director in 2014, in which capacity she oversaw the company’s art fairs in Los Angeles, New York, and London. In January 2020, just ahead of the Covid-19 crisis, she was made director of Frieze’s board; she occupied the role for two years,leavingin early 2022, just ahead of the launch of Frieze Seoul. Siddall is a cofounder of the charities Gallery Climate Coalition and Murmur, which promote environmental responsibility within the art and music industries; until recently, she was board chair of London nonprofit Studio Voltaire.

In a statement, Siddall cast the present moment as “perhaps the most exciting time in the NPG’s history” and lauded Cullinan’s leadership, adding, “The perfect stage has been built and I am thrilled to work with my new colleagues, the museum’s trustees and supporters and of course the artists, as we look to the future and embark on a new chapter.”