Board of Directors
art+château’s Board of Directors is the legal governing authority of our association under Swiss law. It is comprised of a team of experienced professionals that bring together a unique and complementary set of knowledge and skills.
Dr. Valentina Locatelli – President of the Board
Co-Founder of art+château.
Curator, editor and cultural project manager.
DR. VALENTINA LOCATELLI is an experienced curator, editor and cultural project manager based in Berne, Switzerland.
She is a co-founder of art+château and has served as its president and artistic director since 2021.
Her practice moves between historical and contemporary art. With a strong background in both fields, Dr. Locatelli works at the intersection of curatorial research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public engagement. Her projects often bring contemporary voices into dialogue with historical contexts and activate spaces through site-specific approaches.
After a decade of curatorial, research, and publication work in Swiss institutions, including the Fondation Beyeler, Kunstmuseum Bern, and the Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana (MASI) in Lugano, she began working independently. One of her first independent projects was the exhibition “Yuan Yuan: Alternative Realities” at Palazzo Terzi in Bergamo (2021), marking a shift toward working directly with historic spaces as curatorial frameworks.
Alongside her curatorial practice, she regularly writes for exhibition catalogues and has authored and/or edited over twenty books on modern and contemporary art. She holds a PhD in Text Theory and Analysis from the University of Bergamo and a Master of Advanced Studies in Museology from the University of Geneva.
A native Italian speaker, she is fluent in English, French, and German, and conversant in Spanish.
Catherine Scharf Chevalley
Member of the Board.
Expert in the fields of cultural diplomacy and nation branding for Switzerland.
CATHERINE SCHARF CHEVALLEY is an expert in the fields of cultural diplomacy and nation branding for Switzerland, based in Lisbon, Portugal.
With 30 years of experience in the cultural field, she served as Cultural Counsellor for Switzerland in the Embassy of Berlin and at the General Consulates in São Paulo and New York. In 2021, she finished her career at the Swiss Embassy in Paris after contributing for 5 intense years to the development of the rich cultural exchange between the Swiss Confederation and France.
Ms Scharf Chevalley graduated from the University of Nice-Côte d'Azur in Economic Sciences and Entrepreneurial Management, after which she specialized in Cultural Diplomacy. She has a vast knowledge of Swiss cultural production and institutions, as well as of the global contemporary art world. French is her mother tongue and she is fluent in English, German and Portuguese.
Her vast experience and wide-ranging network of contacts are an invaluable asset to the advancement of art+château.
Dr. Werner Leu
Member of the Board (Treasurer).
Geologist and expert in governance, finance and project management.
DR. WERNER LEU is a geologist active in the energy industry, based in Ticino, Switzerland.
He studied geology at the University of Bern and received his PhD in 1986. He has over 30 years of professional experience as a geologist and expert in energy resource exploration. After five years as a research geologist with Shell in The Hague, he co-founded Geoform Ltd., a consulting company active since 1992 in Switzerland and internationally.
Through his career he gained experience in governance, finance and project management. He attended several courses in the Sculpture School of Peccia (Ticino) and served from 2017 to 2020 as President of the Board of Trustees of the Centro Internazionale di Scultura (International Sculpture Center ) in Peccia. He has been a member of art+château since its early years.
GIULIA BUSETTI is an independent curator and producer based in Hamburg, Germany. She represents the GenF Committee within the art+château Board.
She has been a collaborator of art+château since 2021, supporting several of the association’s activities, before recently joining the Board in her role of President of the G
Her practice spans commercial galleries, institutional contexts, experimental spaces, as well as art festivals, across Switzerland, Italy, the UK, and Germany, where she has conceived and developed ideas, accompanying artists through site-responsive practices through the medium of the exhibition.
At the core of her curatorial approach is an engagement with places shaped by plural histories, and an attention to artistic practice as a palpable manifestation within space. Her work is guided by a critical reading of the genius loci — navigating in search of a sense of belonging. She is drawn to what art can do when it cultivates the counterintuitive: the notion that things could be otherwise, in ways not yet imagined — an intuition that already exists, waiting/calling for a gaze willing to rest on the margins, while staying open to the narratives still to come.
She holds a grounding in Art History, a Post-Master’s in Contemporary Curating from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and an MA in Arts and Cultural Management from King’s College London.
XANTHI SKOULARIKI is a cultural strategist and art market specialist based between Zurich and Athens.
She has over twenty years of international experience across curatorial programming, institutional partnerships, and business development in the primary and secondary art markets. Her career began at Phillips London and Christie’s before she established an independent art market practice in London, advising artists, collectors, galleries, and cultural initiatives across Europe.
Xanthi works internationally with artists, artists’ estates, museums, galleries, collectors, and cultural organisations, developing strategic collaborations and curatorial initiatives that foster sustainable cultural ecosystems. She co-established a Zurich-based art catalyser dedicated to advancing the visibility and agency of women artists and is Co-founder of AWITA Switzerland, the Swiss chapter of the Association of Women in the Arts.
Xanthi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and a Master’s degree in Curating Contemporary Design from Kingston University.
Xanthi Skoulariki
Member of the Board.
Cultural strategist and art market specialist.
Honorary Co-Founders & ADVISORS
art+château honors these distinguished individuals as honorary co-founders and advisors. While no longer actively involved in day-to-day activities, they have contributed significantly to the association’s development and continue to inspire our mission through their legacy and expertise.
Dr. Hans-Michael Herzog
Co-Founder of art+château. Former President of the Board (2018–2020)
Betsabeé Romero
Co-Founder of art+château. Former Vice-President of the Board (2018–2020)
Dr. Barbara Dawson
Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Dr. Hans-Michael Herzog is an acknowledged international expert on contemporary art, particularly from Latin America. He is based in Zurich, Switzerland. He studied art history, philosophy, and classical archaeology at the University of Bonn and was awarded his PhD in 1984 with a focus on Venetian Proto-Renaissance Sculpture. From 1987 until 1989, Dr. Herzog worked for the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München. Between 1989 and 1999 he was Curator of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Dr. Herzog was the Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Daros Latinamerica Collection (2000–2015) and the Artistic Director of the Daros Collection (2005–09), both based in Zürich. He was Founding Director of the Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Betsabeé Romero is a plastic artist based in Mexico City, Mexico. For more than 15 years Romero’s work has specialized in the elaboration of a critical discourse on issues such as migration, miscegenation and mobility, through the resemantization of symbols and daily rites of the culture of global consumption, such as automobiles, tattoos, urban signage, et al. In the same way, Romero has been interested in addressing the problems of public art and popular art, its permanence and relationship with the social fabric and with an alternative audience to contemporary art. Romero has had more than 100 individual exhibitions in Mexico, the United States and Europe.
Dr. Barbara Dawson is Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery of modern and contemporary art in Dublin. She has overseen the transition of the city art gallery into a leading cultural institution and organised several Irish and international exhibitions and projects. In 1998, she secured the gift of Francis Bacon’s Studio and Archive in London from the artist’s heir and oversaw all aspects of the removal of the studio from London and its successful installation in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. In 2010, she was awarded a PhD in Fine Arts in recognition of her services to the visual arts; in 2014, she was appointed Adjunct Professor of The School of Art History and Critical Policy at University College Dublin and was a member of the Trinity Long Room Hub Institute Board 2017–2020. In 2019, she was appointed a Creative Fellow of University College Dublin, College of Arts and Humanities.