Henrietta Lidchi becomes the new director in Berlin

Social and political issues

Lidchi was born in London in 1966, she holds a doctorate in anthropology and started her career in 1994 at the British Museum in London, where she worked in various positions until 2002, including as curator for the Asian and North American collections, as head of the central planning office of the museum management and as deputy head of the ethnography department.

From 2005 she worked at the National Museum Scotland in Edinburgh for two years. After working at the National Museum of Wereldculturen in the Netherlands, she moved to the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe in the United States in 2022 as Executive Director.

SPK President Marion Ackermann emphasizes that Lidchi is “internationally experienced and well connected” and sees “her new position as more than just a museum job”. The Brit sees the Humboldt Forum as a narrative space in which curatorial, social and political issues unfold on an equal footing. Lidchi is about attracting new target groups and the question of what actually defines a museum today. “It is precisely this discourse that is important to us,” says Ackermann.

In her academic work, Lidchi has examined, among other things, the art and material culture of the Native Americans as well as military collections of the British Empire. She developed new and critical perspectives on historical collections.