Professor Marie Conte-Helm OBE
Professor Marie Conte-Helm has lectured extensively on the history, arts, and culture of Asia, the Pacific, and the wider world and is an Accredited Lecturer of The Arts Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She holds higher degrees in the History of Art and in Asian Art from the City University of New York and the East West Center of the University of Hawaii and conducted her postgraduate research on Chinese Landscape Painting at the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
Professor Conte-Helm has served as Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group and Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the largest UK charity supporting links between the two countries. She has held academic posts as Reader in Japanese Studies and Director, East Asian Developments at Northumbria University, and as Head of the Japanese Studies Division at the University of Sunderland. Her book publications include The Japanese and Europe: Economic and Cultural Encounters and Japan and the North East of England: From 1862 to the Present Day.
She was awarded an OBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to UK-Japan educational and cultural relations. In 2019 she was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette by the Government of Japan ‘in recognition of her long-time dedication and significant contributions to the promotion of mutual understanding and cultural exchange between Japan and the United Kingdom’.