Vivien Duffield

Vivien Duffield is head of the Clore Duffield Foundation, formerly chaired by her father Sir Charles Clore. The Foundation has pledged £12.3m to Clore Education Centres in national museums and galleries since 1998. Vivien has founded and has close associations with many charities and schemes in the arts world. She has devoted her life to philanthropy and charitable giving with an estimated £100 million in endowments raised during her career.

After the death in 1979 of Sir Charles Clore, one of Britain’s most successful businessmen and generous philanthropists, Vivien continued her father’s charity endeavours, becoming Chair of the Clore Foundation which she merged in 2000 with her own foundation, to create the Clore Duffield Foundation. The overwhelming majority of the Foundation’s grants support the arts, museums, galleries and heritage sectors while another branch of grants are dedicated to performing arts education programmes. Dame Vivien has also been Chair of the Clore Foundation in Israel since 1979.

In addition to the Chairmanship of her Foundations, Dame Vivien is also Founder and Life Patron of Eureka! Museum for Children in Halifax (www.eureka.org.uk), created out of her desire to give British children a similar learning opportunity to that provided by children’s museums in the United States. In 2004, and following visits to various Jewish community centres in the USA, Dame Vivien became Founding Trustee of the Jewish Community Centre for London project. www.jewishcommunitycentre.org.uk). From 1999 to 2004 the Foundation ran ‘Artworks: The Young Artists of the Year’ Awards, a national awards scheme designed to encourage and celebrate visual literacy and creativity in schools (www.art-works.org.uk). In 2003, the Foundation extended its interest in the cultural sector, and in education and training, by launching the Clore Leadership Programme, a scheme designed to develop a new generation of cultural leaders for the UK (www.cloreleadership.org). Dame Vivien is Founder and Patron of the Programme, which is based at Somerset House and led by Lord Smith of Finsbury.

Vivien Duffield’s charitable work has been formally acknowledged by many institutions. Following the opening of the Clore Gallery at the Tate, she was named as Benefactor of the Year by the National Art Collections Fund in 1988, awarded the CBE in 1989, the DBE in 2000, the Mont Blanc Arts Patronage Award in 2001 and the Walpole Award for Cultural Excellence 2005. She is an Honorary Fellow of the City of Jerusalem, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford University) and of King’s College London and is an Honorary Member of the Royal College of Music. She also has an Hon. DLitt. from the University of Buckingham and an Hon. DPhil. from the Weizmann Institute.

Dame Vivien is closely associated with a number of charities and, since the early 1980s, has sat on various Appeal Committees and Development Boards for the NSPCC, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the Royal Marsden. She is Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Wiezmann Institute of Science in Israel and was a Trustee of Dulwich Picture Gallery from 1993 to 2002.

She was a member of the Board of the Royal Opera House from 1990 to 2001 and is now Chairman of the Royal Opera House Endowment Fund. Dame Vivien became a Director of the South Bank Centre board in 2002, is on the Board of the World Monuments Fund in Britain and is a Governor of the Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet School.

“A brilliant social fundraiser… [Vivien] Duffield continues to be one of the most high-profile and effective philanthropists in the arts world”

The Times Newspaper Online

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