Dr Melanie Vandenbrouck is the Chief Curator at Pallant House Gallery. She was formerly Curator, Sculpture 1900-Now at the Victoria and Albert Museum. There she focused on developing the collection and devising a programme of contemporary sculpture interventions. Previously, Melanie was Curator of Art Post-1800 at Royal Museums Greenwich (2012-20), where she founded the Museum’s Contemporary Arts Forum and led on the collecting of contemporary art, particularly work by women artists and photography. She was part of the team working on the redisplay of the Queen’s House in 2016. Her exhibitions include Yinka Shonibare MBE at Greenwich (2013), War Artists at Sea (2014), The Moon (2019) and guest-curating for the Hasselblad Foundation and Tampere’s Backlight Photo Triennial. Through her varied curatorial work, Melanie developed a fascination for the porosity between artforms and disciplines, and the collision of art and science. She has a particular interest in Modern British Art, artists’ responses to the climate crisis, and art of the African and Caribbean Diaspora.
Melanie is a fellow of the Royal Society of Art and a Trustee of Time and Tide Bell. She trained at the Ecole du Louvre and Sorbonne in Paris, Sussex University (Erasmus programme) and the Courtauld Institute of Art where she gained her PhD in 2009.