Trustees
Harewood House Trust is an educational charity Trust, registered Charity in England no 517753, and as such, all strategic decisions regarding the charity’s future are taken by a Board of Trustees, who follow the Charity Governance Code and the laws set out by the Charities Commission. Members of the Lascelles family are a key part of the Trust’s Board, and whilst they must always be in the minority, the work alongside the majority of non-family Trustees to provide guidance and continuity, in order to share responsibility for the Trust’s long-term sustainability and fulfilment of charitable aims. Board members embody a wide range of skills and expertise shared with the Trust for no remuneration. This includes extensive senior experience in the fields of collections care, finance, arts, culture and heritage, business, fundraising, diversity, education, marketing and communications.
Alongside the Board of Trustees sit a number of committees, with delegated authority for specialist areas, as well as the separate Harewood House Trading Limited (company number 01986016). All the profits of the Trading Company are paid to the Charity for the sole purpose of supporting the Trust in delivering its charitable aims.
Harewood House Trust
Board of Trustees
Lady Emily Shard, Chair
Michael Bates
Iwona Blazwick
Jeremy Burton
Arif Ahmad
Diane Howse, Countess of Harewood
David Lascelles, Earl of Harewood
Rachel Mapplebeck
Andrea Nixon MBE
Nima Poovaya-Smith OBE
Harewood House Trading Limited
Board of Directors
Michael Bates, Chair
David Lascelles
James Penfold
David Rowe
Paul Tidswell
Martin Barden
Lady Emily Shard, Chair
Emily Shard (née Lascelles) has worked internationally with diverse, creative and operational teams to deliver projects and content of the highest quality. She prides herself on collaboration, bringing teams together, managing budgets and logistics to keep projects on track and tell a good story. A passionate supporter of culture, the arts, theatre and storytelling – we can illuminate the world, help people connect and care through good stories.
Emily started her career in Feature Films straight out of university, working her way up through the production department. She increasingly worked internationally on blockbuster and Oscar-winning films including Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Cold Mountain and Syriana.
Keen to return to the UK, she spent a period in television documentaries and post production, finding a niche working as a Production Manager for Silverback Films on their Natural History Feature films. Recent releases have included Ed Helms Penguins, Natalie Portmans Dolphin Reef and Megan Markels Elephant, all now showing on Disney+. Also at Silverback she has worked with WWF on a number of film projects linked to the award winning David Attenborough series Our Planet on Netflix. This has included Our Planet Our Business.
Her diverse experience has broadened her capabilities in negotiations, budgeting and financial management facilities management, project delivery, relationship management with stakeholder and suppliers, event management, HR (including pensions and GDPR), logistics and carbon literacy.
When not at Harewood, Emily can be found living and working in Bristol with Husband Matthew Shard and children Ida, Isaac and Otis. Also finding time to walk long distances for charity; including completing a 100Km route over two days through the Cotswolds. Other activities include Dragon Boat Racing for the Rotary club and Deadlifting 60kg.
Michael Bates
Michael Bates has over 30 years commercial and retail leadership experience across small and large businesses.
As Chief Brand and People Officer at online retailer, AO.com he led the business’ communications and marketing activities and headed up the business’ people function. Prior to AO Michael was Group Marketing Director at The Coop, delivering the rebranding and repositioning of the Group. He held Managing Director positions at 2 privately owned, Yorkshire-based businesses: online fashion retailer Joe Browns and luxury bed maker Harrison Spinks. He spent 17 years at Morrisons in commercial buying and marketing roles, including 7 years as Marketing Director.
He now owns and runs The Blue Barn, a leading independent pet supplies and animal feeds business and has non-executive director roles at a number of online retail businesses. Michael was born in Bradford and lives in the Wharfe valley on a farm with his family.
Iwona Blazwick
Iwona Blazwick is Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London and is a curator, critic and lecturer. She was formerly at Tate Modern and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, as well as working as an independent curator in Europe and Japan. She has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions and commissioned new works of art within and outside the museum. Blazwick has also curated outdoor projects in Europe and the UK and is an advisor to the Fourth Plinth and Sculpture in the City projects in London.
Blazwick is series editor of Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Documents of Contemporary Art. She has written monographs and articles on many contemporary artists and published extensively on themes and movements in modern and contemporary art, exhibition histories and art institutions.
Jeremy Burton
Chair, Finances & General Purposes Committee
Jeremy Burton was born in Leeds and has lived most of his life in West Yorkshire. For many years he worked in his family menswear business in a number of roles. He is a Deputy Lieutenant of West Yorkshire High Sheriff of West Yorkshire in 2009/10. Jeremy has been Honorary Consul of France in Leeds for over thirty years. He has been involved with a number of charities, both locally and nationally, and is currently President of Leeds Civic Trust.
Arif Ahmad
Arif is a Partner at PwC, based in Leeds. He was previously PwC’s Leeds Office Senior Partner and is currently Chair of the PwC UK-India Group. He is also a champion for the diversity and inclusion agenda, both within PwC and more broadly.
Being active in the community is really important to Arif. In his three and a half years as PwC Leeds Office Senior Partner, the office raised over £100,000 for charity. He has previously served on the Boards of St Gemma’s Hospice in Leeds and Yorkshire Cricket Foundation.
Diane Howse
Countess of Harewood
Diane Howse is an artist who also has extensive experience of developing a wide range of projects as a curator and gallerist. Her first role, shortly after graduating from art college, was as Gallery Co-ordinator at the then newly opened artist-led Spacex Gallery in Exeter in the early 1980s. She later went on to become Gallery Manager at the also newly opened Watershed in Bristol which, based in a large dockside warehouse, was at the time a major national centre for photography and film.
In 1989 she founded the Harewood Contemporary programme and opened the Terrace Gallery in Harewood House, the first designated contemporary art gallery to open in an English country house. Harewood Contemporary continues the Lascelles family’s historic commitment to commissioning new work and supporting creativity, showing emerging and established artists and makers alongside Harewood’s collections. She has continued to work closely with Harewood’s curatorial team in developing a changing programme of exhibitions and projects in Harewood House, gardens and landscape.
In 2005 she curated and produced Appearance, a large scale pop-up exhibition over the entire disused ground floor of an apartment block in Leeds city centre. In the following year this led to her, together with Kerry Harker and Pippa Hale, founding PSL (Project Space Leeds) and presenting an ongoing programme of exhibitions and projects in this same space until 2012. Over this time PSL gained support and regular funding becoming an ACE National Portfolio Organisation and in 2012 moved to its new home The Tetley.
She is actively engaged with the arts nationally and specifically in Yorkshire. She is Chair and was one of the key founders of the Geraldine Connor Foundation, Trustee of the Hepworth Wakefield, Patron of SI Leeds Literary Prize and Patron of the Yorkshire Gardens Trust amongst others.
As an artist her work has been shown in many exhibitions and is in a number of public and private collections. She has also worked collaboratively with other artists and curators on a wide range of different projects and often seeks unusual or unconventional spaces to show her own and other artists’ work. In 2019 she set up her own company Lawn, based at Harewood Yard, to further develop these activities. Mostly recently her paintings and drawings were included in Psychotropics curated by Iwona Blazwick at the New Art Centre, Roche Court.
Following the death of her father-in-law in 2011, she became Countess of Harewood. She has been a trustee of the Harewood House Trust since 1990.
David Lascelles
Earl of Harewood
David Lascelles was educated at Westminster School and Bristol University, where he abandoned his drama degree halfway through for more practical experience of the film and television business. But he always says the six months he spent in India between school and university was the most educational of his life. He worked as a film producer for more than 20 years, initially of documentaries, both broadcast and non-broadcast, then of drama for TV and the cinema. His credits include Inspector Morse, Moll Flanders and Second Sight for TV, and for the cinema The Wedding Gift (with Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent), The Wisdom of Crocodiles (with Jude Law) and the movie of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Ian McKellen. Many of these productions received nominations and Inspector Morse won both a BAFTA and a Royal Television Society award for Best Drama Series under his watch.
David is deeply involved in Yorkshire’s cultural life. He chaired the Year of Photography in 1998 and sits or has sat on various boards, including that of Welcome to Yorkshire when they brought the Grand Départ of the Tour de France to the county in 2014. He chaired the 100 day Yorkshire Festival which lead up to the race itself and its follow-up two years later, bringing performers from all over the world to perform across the county. He is a patron of the Yorkshire Film Archive, Leeds West Indian Centre and Yorkshire County Cricket Club among others and in 2019 became Honorary President of Leeds United.
He was chairman of Harewood House Trust for many years. In 2007 he produced the late Geraldine Connor’s theatrical spectacular, Carnival Messiah (Handel’s Messiah performed Caribbean Carnival style), in the Grounds as part of the commemoration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. He was also executive producer of the film of the show, released in 2017. Since Geraldine’s death in 2011 he has helped establish a foundation in her name, to encourage young people from a range of backgrounds with a talent in the performing arts.
David’s other great love is for the Himalayas, where he has travelled extensively. He is chairman of the Orient Foundation for Culture & the Arts, who have worked for over 30 years to help preserve Tibetan culture. In 2004/5 he invited a group of monks from Bhutan to build a stupa at Harewood. His book about the experience, A Hare-Marked Moon, is published by Unbound and will be available in Spring 2021.
On the death of his father in the summer of 2011 he became the 8th Earl of Harewood.
Rachel Mapplebeck
Rachel Mappleback is a cultural communications specialist focused on building audiences, brand and profile for arts organisations. She is Director of Communications at Art Fund, the national charity for art, which inspires everyone to access art and culture, and also drives awareness of its nationwide charitable programme. At Art Fund Rachel oversees digital, content, media relations, public affairs, Art Quarterly magazine and Art Fund Museum of the Year.
She was previously head of communications at the Whitechapel Gallery, where she helped double visitor figures, develop the brand and expand the gallery, and has also previously led campaigns for the Jerwood Painting Prize, Jerwood Sculpture Prize, the Affordable Art Fair and the Chelsea Art & Antiques Fair. Rachel is also a trustee for Gasworks gallery and studios, a public arts organisation with a global network.
Andrea Nixon MBE
Andrea Nixon is a director and consultant with a track record in change management, partnership programming, business development and fundraising. Appointed Executive Director of Tate Liverpool in 2006, she led the management and development of the gallery until May 2018. She has national board experience at Arts Council England (North), the Crafts Council and The Audience Agency, as well as serving on the Visitor Economy Board for the City Region LEP from 2011–18. Prior to moving to Liverpool, Andrea was Director of Development for the Tate in London from 1998–2006, playing a key role in the creation of both Tate Modern and Tate Britain.
As an independent consultant and as an associate with Counterculture and People Make it Work consultancies she works with a range of clients on strategic cultural planning and placemaking, including Liverpool City Council, the Old Vic Theatre, Marketing Cheshire, The Box Plymouth, Tees Valley Combined Authority, English National Ballet, Turner Contemporary, St Helens Council, Middlesbrough Cultural Partnership and National Museums Liverpool.
Andrea is currently Chair of the V&A Dundee Advisory Council, Chair of the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Theatres and a Trustee of Harewood House Trust. She was awarded the MBE for services to the arts in 2019.
Nima Poovaya-Smith OBE
Nima Poovaya-Smith is a curator, writer and speaker. As founding Director of Alchemy until 2018, she has undertaken a number of major artistic programmes in partnership with cultural, academic and public sectors. She was previously Head of Special Projects, National Media Museum, Bradford; Director of Arts, Arts Council England (Yorkshire); and Senior Curator at Bradford Galleries and Museums. She has contributed to numerous international and national publications including books and journals on subjects ranging from contemporary art, Indian jewellery, textiles, and curatorial practice.
Nima is Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Fine Arts, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She is a Trustee of Harewood House Trust and a patron of The Leeds Library. Along with six other women collectors, her role in building up the South Asian Collections for Bradford Museums and Galleries was celebrated in an exhibition: Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles at 2 Temple Place, London.
Nima was awarded an OBE in 2016 in the Queen’s Birthday Lists for her services to arts and museums.