Sir Christopher Frayling is Rector of the Royal College of Art in London, and Professor of Cultural History there.  He is also Chairman of Arts Council England, the largest funding body for the arts.

Educated at Repton School and Churchill College, Cambridge (where he was a history scholar, and was awarded a PhD in the history of ideas), he was a lecturer at the Universities of Exeter and Bath during the 1970s, and a film archivist at the Imperial War Museum in London, researching the pioneering television series ‘The World At War’.  He joined the Royal College of Art full-time in 1979.  As the College’s first Professor of Cultural History, he founded the Department of Cultural History there and established pioneering postgraduate courses in the history of design, modern cultural theory, the conservation of artefacts and Visual Arts Administration.  As author of two substantial books on the history of the Royal College of Art, he is also the College’s historian.  In 1996 he was appointed Rector.  On New Year’s Eve 2000 he was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for ‘services to art and design education’.

An historian, a critic and a broadcaster, he is well known for his work on BBC Radio 4 (Kaleidoscope, Stop the Week, Front Row, the award-winning series Britannia – the film, and America – the Movie), BBC Radio 3 (Critics’ Forum, Third Opinion, Nightwaves), BBC World Service (Print the Legend, The City and the Cinema), Television’s BBC2 (Movie Profiles, Timewatch) and Channel 4 (The Art of Persuasion –  which won a Gold Medal at the New York Film and Television Festival). His historical play for Radio 4 – The Rime of the Bounty – was awarded a Sony Radio Award/Society of Authors Award for ‘best original script’ in 1990.  His five-part television series for BBC2 (with the A&E network), The Face of Tutankhamun, was critically acclaimed as ‘an adventure worthy of Spielberg’, and is still being shown.  His follow-up five-part series for BBC2, Strange Landscape – the illumination of the middle ages - was screened in summer 1995.  This was followed at Christmas 1996 by a major four-part BBC1 television series called Nightmare – the birth of horror (also with A&E), which attracted excellent audiences and critical notices.  These three series have been broadcast all over the world.  He has since made several documentaries as DVD ‘special features’.

Sir Christopher Frayling is the longest-serving trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, since 1983.  He was for many years Chairman of the Crafts Study Centre, a Trustee of the Design Museum, and a member of the ‘litmus group’ overseeing the contents of the Millennium Dome – with special responsibility for the Faith Zone.  He was in the 1980s a governor of the British Film Institute and a member of the Crafts Council.  He was a founder-member of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, now the Arts and Humanities Research Council – for which he campaigned.  He was Chairman of the Design Council, and remains Chair of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, which selects the designs of coins for the UK.

He has published sixteen books on visual culture, design and history, over the last twenty-five years.  He has also authored a number of academic articles on the history of ideas, arising from his doctoral work, and contributed essays to many exhibition catalogues – including for the Hayward Gallery, Tate Britian, the Serpentine and the Victoria and Albert Museum – as well as papers to conference proceedings and public sector reports.