Danielle van Zuijlen is a curator and advisor – or rather, a sparring partner for artists and organisations, with a love for initiating new artistic platforms.
In 2018 she co-initiated Kunsthal Gent, where she is currently responsible for the coordination of the artistic programme and for running the Development programme (Kunsthal Gent’s residency programme.) For studio organisation NUCLEO she recently developed an artist support policy and programme. After graduating from the Master of Fine Art programme at Glasgow School of Art, Scotland in 2002, Van Zuijlen co-founded Hotel Mariakapel, a residency and exhibition space in Hoorn, NL, where she directed the programme until 2008. She did residencies with IBB, Curaçao (2007) and Capacete, Rio de Janeiro (2010, 2013) and was a guest curator at Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem (2009), Culturgest, Porto (2010), Nest, The Hague (2011, 2012) and The Model, Sligo, Ireland (2015-16). While her main activity is currently at Kunsthal Gent, she is also the artistic coordinator of a long-term public art program for the Tondelier area of Ghent, Belgium (PILOOT, since 2015). She co-develops collaboration projects between Flemish arts organisations (e.g. initiating Kunsthal Gent BE in 2018; or SOLO, a residency as a collaboration between Flemish studio organisations, 2017-2018, resulting in umbrella platform UFO.) Furthermore, she serves as an advisor for several funding bodies: the Kunstendecreet in Flanders (since 2019), the cultural projects committee of the City of The Hague in The Netherlands (since 2018) and as external expert for the Creative Europe program of the European Commission (since 2014, lead expert since 2017.) She is a board member of Kunstenpunt/ Flanders Arts Institute, the Flemish organisation for support and development of the arts. Her wide interests include artistic development and strengthening the position of the artist, public programming, horizontal/collaborative attitudes and new institutional models, and artistic strategies for the public domain.