As a registered UK charity, Delfina Foundation is governed by a Board of Trustees who have responsibility for overall direction, financial and legal accountability, and the delegation of decision-making to the Creative Team and Strategic Advisory Panel.

Delfina Entrecanales CBE

(1927-2022)
Founder


For over 40 years, Delfina Entrecanales created spaces for artists and other visionaries to share and debate their ideas and working practices, most notably by pioneering artist residencies at Delfina Studio Trust and then through its successor, Delfina Foundation.


Photo: Christina Holka

From 1988-2006, Delfina Studio Trust provided free/subsidised studios for artists based in London alongside becoming the UK’s largest international artists residency space, nurturing a generation of highly acclaimed artists, including more than a dozen Turner Prize nominees such as Jane & Louise Wilson, Tacita Dean, Shirazeh Houshiary, Mark Titchner, Martin Creed, Michael Raedecker, Keith Tyson, Mark Wallinger, among many other acclaimed artists.

At the age of 80, Entrecanales established Delfina Foundation to focus on mutual artistic exchange with the Middle East & North Africa following many personal trips in the region. In the immediate post 9/11 period, she recognised a more apparent and more complicated gap between the East and West to which she responded with Delfina Foundation.

In many ways the work of Delfina Foundation continued of Entrecanales’ previous relationships with the region through Delfina Studio Trust residencies of artists such as Khalil Rabah, Susan Hefuna, Khosdrow Hassanzadeh, Haluk Akake, Farhad Moshiri, etc. Following five years with an exclusive focus on the Middle East, the foundation’s remit was expanded to include more international partnerships and to support artists from around the world.

Entrecanales was always interested in artists, as individuals, rather than as agents of change; yet, she firmly believed that they have the power to alter the way we see the world and perhaps each other. It is the personal rather than the professional connection to artists that mattered most to Entrecanales. She often said she “collected artists not art”. For this reason, she has been described as a sort of ‘international mother’ of the arts.

Delfina was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2012, the year of the Diamond Jubilee, and she was also the recipient The Prince of Wales Medal for Philanthropy in the Arts in 2013.

Delfina retired from the Board of Trustees in 2020. She passed away in April 2022.

Profiles


Further reading

Delfina Entrecanales CBE (1927 – 2022)

Announcing the passing of our founder

Mark Muller KC

Trustee


Mark Muller is a senior barrister and is involved in many human rights organisations.


Throughout the last fifteen years, he has been involved in a series of groundbreaking human rights cases before the European Court of Human Rights involving freedom of expression and cultural identity. As a member of the Bar Human Rights

Litigation Team, he was involved in the US Supreme Court Case of Hamdan v Rumsfeld which upheld the habeas corpus and fair trial rights of Guantanamo detainees.

Mark has written extensively on a wide variety of human rights and legal subjects and has made regular appearances in the international and national media on issues such as the abolition of the death penalty, journalistic freedom and Guantanamo Bay. In 2006 Mark was short-listed for Liberty’s prestigious Human Rights Lawyer of the Year.

He is the founder of Beyond Borders Scotland.

IRENE PANAGOPOULOS

Trustee


Irene Panagopoulos is the CEO of Magna Marine Inc. She is actively involved in many organisations, serving as a Trustee of Dia Art Foundation, New York, and a Trustee of Northeastern University in Boston.

She is a member of the Contemporary and Modern Middle Eastern Art acquisition group at the British Museum, Tate’s International Council, the Whitechapel Gallery’s Commissioning Council, and the Cycladic Museum Contemporary Art Council, among other appointments and committees.

In 2018, Irene was collector-in-residence at Delfina Foundation.

Charles Wansbrough

Trustee


Bio coming soon