Marie Lavandier has been appointed director of Louvre-Lens, the outpost of the Paris museum based in northern France which opened in December 2012. Lavandier replaces Xavier Dectot, who stepped down earlier this year to head the department of art and design at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Lavandier is a specialist in 20th-century art, while Dectot is a medieval art expert; her contract runs for five years and can be renewed thereafter for three-year periods.
In 2014, Lavandier was named director of Nice museums, a city-run network of 12 sites and organisations including the Musée des Beaux-Arts and the Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain.
From 2006 to 2010, she was the deputy director of heritage and collections at the ethnographic art museum, Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris. Since 2013, she has been president of the council at Iccrom (the Rome-based International centre for the study of the preservation and restoration of cultural property).
Located on a former mining site, Louvre-Lens has welcomed more than two million visitors since its launch. The satellite branch drew 900,000 visitors in its first year compared to 400,000 in 2015.
