Charles Saumarez Smith is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts.  He was born in 1954 and educated at Marlborough and King’s College, Cambridge.  After graduating, he spent a year at Harvard University as a Henry Fellow studying at the Fogg Art Museum and then returned to the Warburg Institute as a postgraduate student.  In 1979, he was elected Christie’s Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge and, in 1982, he joined the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum as an Assistant Keeper with special responsibility for V&A/RCA MA in the History of Design.  In 1990, he was appointed Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  In 1994, he was appointed Director of the National Portrait Gallery and, in 2002, Director of the National Gallery.  He took up his appointment as Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in September 2007. 

Dr. Saumarez Smith is a Governor of the University of Arts, London, an Honorary Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and has received honorary degrees from the Universities of London, Westminster, Sussex, East Anglia and Essex. In 2002, he was Slade Professor at Oxford University.