our
trustees
Mark Tattersall (Chair)
After graduating in Japanese Studies Mark started his career in the arts as a musician, playing drums and percussion with a number of bands, most notably Cabaret Voltaire. In 1986 he joined CBS Records and spent the next 14 years in the music industry, latterly as Vice President of the SINE division of Sony Music Europe, working with some of the UK and Europe’s most successful recording artists of the 1990s including Oasis, Suede, Gipsy Kings, Primal Scream and Fatboy Slim. In 2000 he moved into the visual arts, running an art gallery in France and an art consultancy in London where he curated the 2007 Gibson Guitartown project, culminating in a major outdoor exhibition next to Tower Bridge and a fundraising auction that raised in excess of £200,000. In 2008 he joined the Art Academy in London where he was Chief Executive until moving to Dorset in 2012 to take up his current post as Artistic Director of Dorchester Arts. Mark has held trustee posts at The Red Hot AIDS Charitable Trust, The Art House and Dorset Visual Arts, and is currently acting as a consultant to The Maltings Arts on a scheme to develop a £8.8m theatre in Dorchester, Dorset.
Melanie Gerlis
Melanie Gerlis is the art market columnist for the Financial Times and Editor at Large for The Art Newspaper. She was previously Art Market Editor of The Art Newspaper for nine years and has been reporting on auctions, art fairs and market news globally since 2006. She also worked for ten years at Finsbury, a strategic communications and investor relations firm, advising investment banks, hedge funds and other financial services clients.
Melanie has a BA in English Literature from Clare College, Cambridge and an MA in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. Her book, “Art as an Investment? A Survey of Comparative Assets,” was published by Lund Humphries in 2014.
Paul Harris
Paul Harris is former CFO of Liberty, with fifteen years of senior level operational experience including opening restaurants within department stores Liberty and Selfridges. Having been headhunted from Kurt Geiger, in 2013 Paul successfully completed the second major refinancing of Liberty. He was also the Chairman of a luxury British company that Liberty acquired, is currently NED of The Wine Fusion, and recently launched Curveball a cutting edge dining experience in South London.
Jenna Littler
Since April 2017, Jenna Littler has been Burberry’s Senior Vice President for Wholesale, Franchise and Travel Retail across its EMEIA region. She joined Burberry in 2010 and led the company’s communications activities worldwide before moving into the newly-created role of Senior Vice President, Global Integration in 2014, working alongside Chief Creative and Chief Executive Officer Christopher Bailey on the development and implementation of Burberry’s strategic priorities globally.
Jenna joined Burberry from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in London, before which she held various positions in the UK Civil Service. She started her career in financial communications.
Jenna is passionate about the arts in all their forms. She holds a First Class degree in History of Art from Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and qualified in Architectural Interior Design at the Inchbald School of Design in London.
Paul Kullich
Paul has been a Trustee of the Art Academy for the last 10 years and been involved in it’s growth and helping to enable it’s unique ethos to reach many students around the world since its foundation.
Paul’s background is in technology and he has delivered large technology change programmes for clients such as the BBC, ITV, BSkyB and BP. He has subsequently founded TUMRA, a digital marketing optimisation service, which offers a software product enabling businesses to improve the performance of their programmatic advertising and marketing campaigns.
Daniel Wright
Daniel is an associate partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partner. He has been at the practice for over 17 years and has been involved in a range of projects at all stages from feasibility to post-contract including airports, residential, offices and public buildings. He has also been involved in teaching post-graduate students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL where he has been a practice tutor and crit juror for the 4th year Design Realisation module.
Amir Zahedi (Company Secretary)
Amir is a Chartered accountant in public practice with a wide knowledge of companies and commercial ventures in many industry sectors. He has hands on experience of working in the Fareast and Canada .
In the UK he has worked for an industrial multinational conglomerate and UK quoted companies. Earlier on he trained and worked for many years in the City with Coopers & Lybrand who were one of the predecessors to Price Waterhouse Coopers .