Dr. Edmund P. Pillsbury is one of America’s foremost museum professionals, with an international reputation as a connoisseur, scholar, and arts administrator.  In 1985 the French government awarded Dr. Pillsbury a knighthood in the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres).  In 1986 the Trustees of the National Gallery, London, selected him to succeed Sir Michael Levey as director of the preeminent English institution. In 1991 New York Times art critic John Russell characterized Dr. Pillsbury as “one of the most gifted men in the American museum profession.”  In 1997 he was elected a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Pillsbury, a Yale graduate (B.A. 1965), holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance Art from the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art.  He accepted the directorship of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, a midsize institution founded in 1964 that serves one of the country’s largest metropolitan and regional audiences, in December of 1980.  The consistently high quality and importance of Dr. Pillsbury’s acquisitions brought international recognition to the Kimbell Art Museum.

He helped to found the Hermitage’s International Advisory Board, which he chaired for five years, and currently serves as a member of that Board and President of the American Friends of the Hermitage Museum. Dr. Pillsbury has served as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Partner of Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art, Limited, Dallas (2000-03), and Director of the Meadows Museum and Professor of Art History at SMU, Dallas (2003-05).  He is currently Research Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas where he teaches courses in connoisseurship and oversees museum studies. He and his wife, Mireille, live in Dallas, Texas.