Founder's Bio
An art historian by training, Florence Derieux has nearly 30 years of experience as a museum director and curator in the contemporary art world, building, running, and programming institutions internationally. She has worked for public as well as private organizations in Europe and in the U.S., and has acquired recognized extensive professional experience of museums and their patrons.
Her career started in 1997 in London and then in Amsterdam where, in 1999, she was the first French participant in the De Appel foundation's International Curatorial Training Program. The following year, Jérôme Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud recruited her to become the first Curator of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. At 29 years old, she was appointed by Jean-Louis Andral, the Director of the Picasso Museum in Antibes, as his Deputy. She later worked in an interim capacity as Head of the Contemporary Art Department of Lausanne’s Museum of Fine Arts under the leadership of Yves Aupetitallot, before joining the national contemporary art center Le Magasin in Grenoble as Curator-at-Large.
Between 2008 and 2016, she was the Director of the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims. Simultaneously, she was appointed by Art Basel for a 3-year term as Curator of Parcours, the fair's only free-access public art program. In 2015, the Los Angeles-based Centre Pompidou Foundation recruited her as their first Curator of American Art as well as Curator-at-Large of the Pompidou Center, and she relocated to New York. Since then, she has been advising major public and private museums and collections, curating and coordinating ambitious exhibitions and editing important publications, notably for the Centre Pompidou, Hauser & Wirth, and Musée national Picasso-Paris.
Florence Derieux has worked in close collaboration with hundreds of artists on exhibitions, commissions, performances, lectures and various types of events, as well as on acquisitions. She has also edited and published many catalogs and monographs, including “Tom Burr. Anthology: Writings 1991-2015” (Sternberg Press, 2015), “Agnes Denes: Work 1969-2013” (Mousse Publishing, 2016), “Farah Atassi” (Manuella Editions, 2022), and has contributed texts to a number of books, magazines and other publications.
She also taught Contemporary Art & Exhibitions History at the ESBA–National School of Art in Montpellier and at the ECAL–University of Art and Design in Lausanne, and was Tutor of the International Curatorial Training Program at Le Magasin–National Centre for Contemporary Art, in Grenoble. She has served as an Advisor to the Board of the Atelier Calder in Saché, France, and as a member of the Scientific Committees of Milan's Fondazione Furla, Paris' National Center for Visual Arts (CNAP), New York's French-American Fund for Contemporary Art of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, as well as a member of various committees and juries.
