Elena Ochoa Foster, Chair of the Council of the Serpentine Galleries

Elena Ochoa (Lady Elena Foster of Thames Bank) was born in Orense (Spain) in 1958. For more than twenty years, she held the position of Professor of Psychopathology at the Complutense University of Madrid, and until 2001 was Honorary Professor at King’s College, London. In the course of her academic career, she has been Hispanic/North Ameri­can Fulbright scholar at the University of California and, as Visiting Professor, conducted research at numerous universities in Europe as well as in he United States, among them Cambridge, Chicago, Cracow, Hamburg and Pennsylvania. She has worked at Spanish public broadcasters TVE and Radio Nacional, and has been a regular contributor to various newspapers.

In 1996, Elena Ochoa Foster founded Ivorypress publishing house. She directs the C Photo Project, conceived to promote photography and contemporary art through publications, exhibitions and academic and institutional support (Ivorypress has organised the creation of a Chair of Contemporary Art at the University of Oxford, among its other sponsorships at different academic institutions). Along with the team at Ivorypress, she has curated international exhibitions, such as C on Cities (10th Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2006), NY C (Phillips de Pury, New York, 2007), Blood on Paper (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2008) and Real Venice(54th Venice Biennale, 2011 and Somerset House, London, 2011). She is member of the Board of Directors of the Mutual Art Trust and the Prix Pictet Photography Prize. She was President of the Tate International Council and member of the Governing Board of the Tate Foundation between 2004 and 2008, as well as Trustee of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation. She serves as patron of diverse museums, foundations and international schools of contemporary art and photography.