Julia Peyton-Jones

Dame Julia Peyton-Jones (born 18 February 1952) is a British curator and gallery director, currently Senior Global Director at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London, Paris and Salzburg. She formerly worked as Co-Director of the Serpentine Gallery in London. Early life/career Peyton-Jones was educated at Tudor Hall School, a boarding and day independent school for girls, between the village of Bloxham and the market town of Banbury, in Oxfordshire. She left the school in 1970. After leaving school, Peyton-Jones studied painting at the Royal College of Art, between the years 1975–1978, but did not continue a career as a professional artist. Two of her works still hang in the Bank of England. After her education, she was briefly an art lecturer at the Edinburgh College of Art. In 1988 she became a curator at the Hayward Gallery. Serpentine Galleries In 1991, Peyton-Jones became the director of the Serpentine Galleries. In 1998, she oversaw a major refurbishment of the gallery . In 2000 she inaugurated the annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, a project that invites an architect who has previously never been commissioned to work in the United Kingdom to create a temporary structure at the Gallery. The first pavilion was designed by Dame Zaha Hadid. Subsequent pavilions have been designed by Ai Weiwei, Jean Nouvel, and Oscar Niemeyer.