Joachim Pissarro is the Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Galleries, Hunter College, CUNY/City University of New York.

He was a Curator at MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. His recent curatorial projects include Alberto Giacometti | Yves Klein: In Search of the Absolute at Gagosian Gallery London (2016); Pissarro à Eragny at the Musée du Luxembourg (2017); Olga Picasso, Musée National Picasso, Paris (2017), Museo Picasso, Málaga (2019), and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2019).

His latest book Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (2018, Penn State University Press) is co-authored with David Carrier, following Wild Art (Phaidon, 2016). 

Daniel Kroll, a third-generation art collector, entrepreneur and investor, is the Managing Director of Kroll Family Trust overseeing the trust’s investments, cultural activities and publications worldwide.

Since 2013 Daniel has invested in exceptional entrepreneurs and companies through the Kroll Family Trust venture capital activities.

Daniel, as the Chairman of Hermitage Museum Foundation Israel (2015 – 2019), has also played an active role in fostering cultural relations between Israeli and Russian Museums, by supporting numerous exhibitions and events for the State Hermitage Museum, The Israel Museum Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum.

Among his cultural activities, Daniel has managed several art publications including “Dynastic Rule Mikhail Piotrovsky and the Hermitage,” by Geraldine Norman (2016), “Sophie’s Testament: From Hanover to Siberia,” by Ingeborg Prior (2016), “El Lissitzky’s Jewish Period” by Alexander Kantsedikas (2017) and the “Russian Avant-Garde and Soviet Power. New Artistic Culture. 1917-1928” by Andrey Sarabianov and Natalya Strizhkova (2021).

Daniel’s commitment to the academia and to empowering educational support for students was manifested through various collaborations with; the After all Institute, SHERA Society, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the The Russian Art & Culture Group and Jacobs University Bremen.

Since 2010 Daniel has been deeply involved in the contemporary art scene and has been cultivating personal connections with emerging and established artists in Israel and Europe. He has been collecting their artworks, commissioning new ones, brainstorming new ideas and projects and exposing their creations to local and international markets.

A Rhodes Scholar, Thierry Morel was educated at the universities of Paris and Oxford, where he graduated in law and history of art.

He was a post doctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge and has done extensive research on the history of art collections and art provenance in Europe.

He also wrote and produced plays and films, among them Private View, a ten-part series of TV documentaries on art collectors. In 2013, he curated the Houghton Revisited exhibition in the UK.

Saranna Biel-Cohen was HMF Executive Director from 2016-2022. Previously she had spent ten years in the commercial art world, at galleries and auction houses in London and New York, across collecting categories. She spearheaded the first acquisitions of modern American photography for the Hermitage and secured the  Hermitage’s first partnership with the U.S. State Department.

Saranna has a BA in Anthropology and French Language and Literature from the University of Michigan and MA in History of Art from University College London. She is also on the board of the Jewish Museum of Greece. 

Torkom Demirjian is the founder and chairman of the family run Ariadne Galleries with locations in New York and London and specializing in the art of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Near East, Greece, Rome, Asia, as well as early medieval Europe. Mr. Demirjian is a graduate of the Pratt Art Institute in New York, but it was his childhood passion for history and art that led to his love of antiquities. A self-taught specialist and a dealer since 1972, he is highly regarded by his colleagues for his expertise, sense of history, astute aesthetic judgment, and business acumen. Mr. Demirjian believes strongly in the vital role museums play in the preservation of our cultural heritage. The Hermitage Museum, often under very difficult circumstances and in heroic fashion, has maintained this role in addition to its mandate of educating and enlightening the public.

When Mr. Demirjian was invited to join the board of directors of the Hermitage Museum Foundation, he accepted without hesitation and with an overwhelming desire to make a positive contribution. He has great faith that the American tradition of voluntarism will benefit The Hermitage Museum as it has so many museums and cultural institutions throughout the world. The American philanthropic community has generously supported Russian cultural institutions in the past, he said, and when it is informed of the urgent needs and lack of financial resources available to the Hermitage, I have every belief it will rise to the occasion and provide the necessary support again. My trust in American generosity is so profound that I assume the chairman’s role with great optimism and a strong belief that helping such a great institution in Russia can only have a beneficial effect on the relationship between our countries.

Mr. Demirjian has been a participant in many museum, university, and legal panels and conferences and has been widely interviewed in the print media as well on television, including CBS 60 Minutes. He has always sought to increase interest in and knowledge of ancient cultures among collectors and the public and has encouraged contributions to museums by his own example. During the last four decades, he has donated both important collections and individual works of art to museums in the United States and abroad, including in 2010 a major collection of artifacts from Urartu to The Hermitage Museum in honor of Dr. Boris Piotrovsky, for which he received The Hermitage Museum Foundation Award.

Mr. Schaffer is renowned in the international antiques trade for his connoisseurship of Russian works of art and antique jewelry. A principal of the legendary fifth-generation family firm, A La Vieille Russie and a born New Yorker, Mr. Schaffer possesses a keen eye and a great sense of humor, both of which endear him to his clients and fellow antiquarians.

In the throes of the Russian Revolution, his family heroically relocated the firm from Kiev to Paris. The winds of World War II occasioned a move to the heart of New York City, first to Rockefeller Center and subsequently to the 59th Street and Fifth Avenue location where the family has welcomed clients, colleagues and friends for the last fifty-plus years. His father, Alexander, intuitively grasped the importance, both historic and artistic, of the work of Carl Fabergé. He was then able to source from the Bolsheviks and Soviets, numerous pieces of the work of this renowned goldsmith and jeweler, including some of the fabled Imperial Eggs, commissioned by Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II.

An authority on Fabergé, Mr. Schaffer has curated numerous exhibitions, and written extensively on the subject. An acknowledged expert in period jewelry and Russian objets d’art, he is a sought-after vettor at major art fairs, where the firm also displays their treasures, such as TEFAF Maastricht, the Winter Antiques Show, the International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show in New York City, and Masterpiece, London. He has lectured at such prestigious institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Gem Society, and the Houston Museum of Natural History, and he frequently appears on the popular TV program, Antiques Roadshow. Mr. Schaffer has served as President of the National Antique and Art Dealers’ Association of America (NAADAA) and as Treasurer of the Confederation Internationale des Négociants en Oeuvres d’Art (CINOA). He now brings his bank of knowledge and wealth of experience to the Hermitage Museum Foundation as member of its Board of Directors and President.

Professor Piotrovsky has served as the Director of the State Hermitage Museum since 1992. He is the son of Boris B. Piotrovsky, the Director of the Museum from 1964 to 1990. Dr. Piotrovsky graduated with honors from the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad State University in 1967, specializing in Arabic Studies, as well as also attending Cairo University from 1965 to 1966. He worked and did further studies at the Leningrad branch of the Institute for Oriental Studies from 1967 until 1991 before joining the Hermitage. Professor Piotrovsky has taken part in archeological excavations in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Yemen and authored more than 200 scholarly works.

A member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Arts, he has received numerous honors, including the Woodrow Wilson Award in 2010. He is also a professor at St. Petersburg State University; Chairman of Museums in Russia; Chairman of the Board of the European University in St. Petersburg; and editor-in-chief of The Christian Orient. In 1997, the International Astronomical Union even named a small planet “Piotrovsky” to honor both Boris and Mikhail Piotrovsky for their contributions to the arts and sciences.

Before his untimely passing in July of 2020, Dr. Richard Brettell, Vice Provost of University of Texas Dallas, served as a Trustee of the Hermitage Museum Foundation since 2015.

Fellow trustee, Joachim Pissarro, reflected on Dr. Bretell’s life in this appreciation, published in Burlington Magazine.

A formal obituary is also available from the Dallas News.