Professor Paul Greenhalgh is the inaugural director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation. He is a writer, curator and historian of the modern visual arts. His previous roles include Director of the Sainsbury Centre (UK), Director and President of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design (Washington DC), President of NSCAD University (Canada), and Head of Research at the V&A Museum (London). He has curated a wide range of exhibitions in a number of countries and published a number of books on the Modern period, including Ephemeral Vistas (1988), Modernism in Design (1993), Art Nouveau 1890-1914 (2000), The Modern Ideal (2004), Fair World (2010), The Nature of Dreams: England and the Formation of Art Nouveau (2020), and Ceramic, art, and Civilisation (2021). He is Professor Emeritus of the University of East Anglia.

Professor Jane Pavitt is ZHF’s Head of Research and Learning, responsible for academic partnerships, curatorial projects and public programmes.  She is a curator, writer and historian of architecture and design.  Her previous roles include Head of Research Impact at Kingston University, Dean of Humanities at the Royal College of Art (London), and Principal Research Fellow at Brighton University and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).  She has curated and authored a range of exhibitions and publications on modern and contemporary architecture and design including Brand.New (2000); Cold War Modern: Art and Design 1945-70 (2008), Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011) and Superstructures: The New Architecture 1960-1990 (2018).  She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Panel, and is a sub-panellist for REF2021 (the UK’s research assessment exercise). She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Design History, the advisory board of the Stanley Picker Gallery/Dorich House Museum and the curatorial committee of the Design Museum. She is a Visiting Professor of Kingston School of Art.

Leonora Baird-Smith is ZHF’s Head of Collections, responsible for the collections, archive, and library of the Foundation. This includes their care, storage, conservation and management, and ZHF’s display programme of loans and exhibitions.  Leonora is a museum professional and qualified project and programme manager, with over fifteen years of experience of working in collections management and curatorial roles and managing major storage and display projects. Her previous roles include Head of Museums at the Metropolitan Police Service and Head of Collections Management at the British Museum; she is currently a Trustee of Bow Street Police Museum. At the Metropolitan Police Service she curated the new Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard, and at the British Museum she was responsible for the management of over eight million objects and the one of the largest UK and international object loans programmes.