Dawn Airey, a media executive who helped found Channel 5 in the UK, has been appointed the new chair of Arts Council England (ACE), an arm’s length public funding body. She will replace Nicholas Serota who has been in post since 2017. Her four-year term, approved by the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, begins on 1 August.
The appointment to the role—one of the most influential posts in the UK culture sector—is timely following the recent review of ACE by the Labour peer Margaret Hodge. “The Arts Council has a clear new mandate, informed by the recent independent review—to do more to support, nurture and protect the arts, and to do so transparently, with speed and with a fairer distribution of spend,” Airey says in a statement.
Arts Council England also overhauled its flagship organisational strategy known as Let’s Create after the Hodge report criticised the framework for being overly bureaucratic. ACE’s new Strategic Framework is based on three principles: “support excellence, deliver for everybody and reach everywhere”.
Unlike her museum director predecessor, Airey’s experience is in the media; she has held leadership roles at Channel 5 and Sky, and served as managing director of global content at ITV and senior vice president at Yahoo! for Europe, Middle East and Africa. She was also the chief executive of Getty Images between 2015 and 2018. In 2023, she was appointed to the voluntary position of Chancellor of Edge Hill University in Lancashire. Airey holds several other non-executive positions across television, theatre and sport, including as chair of the boards of the National Youth Theatre and the Barclays Football Association Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship.
The Chair of Arts Council England works two days per week for a renumeration of £60,000 per annum. Ministers were assisted in the recruitment process by an advisory assessment panel.