Board of Trustees

David Ross is a businessman and was the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, in addition to holding a number of other directorships. He is passionate about developing educational opportunities for young people, and in addition to donating funds from his charitable foundation, he donates his time and expertise to several educational institutions.

Roger Blundell is an experienced finance director, his career spanning public and private companies as well as public bodies, in a variety of sectors including commercial and residential real estate, financial services, retail, broadcasting / digital media, the arts and education. Most recently Roger was CFO of Grosvenor UK, a pre-eminent investment and development company.

Roger is a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery where he also chairs the Audit Committee, is a member of the Audit & Scrutiny committee at the University of Oxford, and sits on both the Finance and Estates committees at University College London.

Roger is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Roger is also a non-executive director and chairs the Investment committee of the Government Property Agency.

Mark Cecil had a 34 year career in Investment management, being a founding partner of Jabre Capital Partners from 2007 - 2019. He currently acts as an investment advisor to several Family Offices.

Mark qualified as a Medical Doctor from St Thomas’s Hospital Medical school in 1982 before obtaining an MBA from INSEAD business school in 1985. He was a founding Patron of the National Portrait Gallery and has sat on the Development Council for several years and more recently the Campaign Council.

Rt Hon Chris Grayling has previously been an active Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. He served on the Board as an ex-officio member when he was Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons in 2015-16. He is a former Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Transport.

He has been Member of Parliament for Epsom and Ewell in Surrey since 2001. Prior to entering Parliament he was a television news producer and director of a number of production and communication businesses.

He has also written a number of history books, including on life in England after the First World War and Anglo-American relations.

Marcus has a professional background as a lawyer specialising in procurement, construction and development. He provides strategic advice on complex projects and has worked with The Crown Estate, The Greater London Authority, Transport for London, The O2 and The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. Marcus is a non-executive adviser to the sponsor board of a major project at the House of Commons. Marcus has a strong interest in the creative arts and has a depth of experience in the heritage sector.

Dr Simon Sebag Montefiore is a prize-winning, bestselling historian and novelist whose books are published in 48 languages. ‘Catherine the Great & Potemkin’ was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. ‘Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar’ won History of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards.

‘Young Stalin’ won the Costa Biography Prize (UK), the LA Times Biography Prize (US) and Le Grand Prix de Biographie (France.) ‘Jerusalem: the Biography’ won Book of the Year, Jewish Book Council (USA) and Wenjin Prize (People’s Republic of China). ‘The Romanovs’ won the Lupicaia del Terriccio Prize (Italy). He is the author of the Moscow Trilogy of novels of which ‘One Night in Winter’ won Political Novel of the Year.

He has written and presented five BBC series on Jerusalem, Rome, Istanbul (‘Byzantium: a tale of three cities’), Spain (‘Blood and Gold’) and Vienna. He read history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University, where he received his Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is married to the novelist Santa Montefiore and lives in London.

The Rt Hon Penny Mordaunt MP was appointed Lord President of the Council, and Leader of the House of Commons, on 6 September 2022. She is an ex-officio Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.

Her previous ministerial positions include:

Minister of State at the Department for International Trade (2021-22)
Paymaster General (2020)
Minister for Women and Equalities (2018)
Secretary of State for International Development (2017)
Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (2016)
Minister for the Armed Forces (2015)
Minister of Local Government (2014)

Penny has been the Member of Parliament for Portsmouth North since 2010.

Rebecca Salter is the 27th President of the Royal Academy of Arts and the first female President since the Academy was founded in 1768. She is an ex-officio Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.

Salter is British painter and printmaker. She exhibits regularly in London and internationally, and in 2011 she had a major retrospective into the light of things at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. A monograph was published to coincide with the show. An accompanying exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery explored links between Western artists and Japan. She has also been artist in residence twice (2003 and 2011) at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut. Salter has undertaken several architectural commissions including 15 Sackville Street, London W1, St George’s Hospital, Tooting and NGS Macmillan Cancer Unit, Chesterfield Royal Hospital. She has work in many private and public collections including Tate, British Museum, Yale Center for British Art and Yale University Art Gallery.

Blake Shorthouse has worked in finance for approximately 30 years. He joined KKR, a global investment manager with a focus on alternative asset classes, in 2014 where he led the firm’s work with Family Capital in Europe and the Middle East. Prior to KKR he worked in London & Zurich at Merrill Lynch, UBS, and Credit Suisse. Blake holds a joint honours degree in History & Politics from Exeter University, UK.

Victoria Siddall is a Strategic Advisor to museums and businesses and an international advocate for a more sustainable art world. She was previously Global Director of Frieze, founding Frieze Masters and then leading art fairs across London, New York, Los Angeles and Seoul, and is now a Non-executive Director of Frieze.

In 2020, Victoria co-founded Gallery Climate Coalition - a charity and membership organisation for the art world which has over 900 members in 42 countries, all of whom have committed to a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. She works with a number of environmental charities on strategy, advocacy and fundraising.

As well as being a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, Victoria is Chair of the Board of Studio Voltaire, a non-profit gallery and artist studio complex in London that has recently reopened after a major capital redevelopment. She is also a Trustee of Gallery Climate Coalition and the Ampersand Foundation.

Sir Peter Stothard is an author, classicist and critic, a former Editor of The Times (1992-2002) and of the TLS (2002-2016). His books include Alexandria (2013) and The Senecans (2016) and cover politics and literature, ancient and modern.

He holds the President's Medal of the British Academy and in 2012 was Chair of judges of the Man Booker Prize for fiction. He was knighted in 2003.

Rachel is a producer and founding director of moving image content creation agency Chocolate Films. Rachel specialises in video production for the arts and heritage industries, for which she creates work for many major museums, galleries and theatres in the UK and internationally from bases in London, Glasgow and Berlin.

Rachel is passionate about inclusivity. She is the creative director of 1000Londoners.com a large-scale video portrait of London, and through Chocolate Films Workshops training programmes, she is working to create a wider diversity among the next generation of filmmakers.

Rachel holds two Honorary Doctorates in Law and Business. She is a Freeman of the City of London and Member of the Company of Entrepreneurs.

Professor Shearer West is Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Nottingham. She has held a number of significant leadership roles in universities and higher education, including Head of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Birmingham, Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford University and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield. She also spent four years as Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council where she chaired the Research Directors Group for Research Councils UK.

She is a Professor of Art History and has authored and edited many articles and nine books including ‘Portraiture’; ‘The visual arts in Germany 1897-1940’; and ‘Fin de Siècle: Art and society in an age of uncertainty’. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society, and has held two visiting Fellowships at Yale University. She was formerly a member of the Board of Visitors for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and currently is a member of the Board of Universities UK.

She has held a number of international roles, including acting as main panel chair for the national research assessment exercise for Humanities in Norway and serving on the steering group to introduce impact into the Excellence in Research (ERA) exercise in Australia. She represented the UK on the Science Europe Humanities Scientific Committee, and has been a jurist for the Spinoza Prize in the Netherlands and the Odysseus and Solvay prizes in Belgium, as well as an Advisory Board member for the Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Vienna.

Jonathan Yeo (b. London 1970) is one of the world’s leading portraitists and has exhibited widely in both the UK and abroad. His sitters include such diverse figures as Sir David Attenborough, Malala Yousafzai, Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, Idris Elba, Nicole Kidman, Baroness Lawrence, Tony Blair and The Duke of Edinburgh. Known for both traditional and experimental portraiture, his work has been the subject of mid-career surveys at the Museum of National History in Denmark (2016), the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle (2014-15), the Lowry in Greater Manchester (2014) and the National Portrait Gallery in London (2013). In 2018, Yeo exhibited a series of works at the Royal Academy of Arts in London all derived from new technologies, including the first bronze sculpture to be made using an innovative combination of processes, including 3D scanning, virtual reality and 3D printing. Other recent projects include collaborations with the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC and The Bowes Museum in County Durham. In 2018 he was named Artist of the Year by GQ Magazine.