MARYAM EISLER
Maryam Homayoun-Eisler was born in Tehran, Iran in 1968. Leaving her homeland in 1978 along with her family, Maryam settled in Europe and studied in France and then at Wellesley College in the United States, where she received a BA in Political Science in 1989. After obtaining an MBA from Columbia University in New York in 1993, she embarked on an international career in Investment banking at Credit Suisse First Boston, followed by a move to marketing at L’Oreal, and then at Estee Lauder.
Married with two small children, Maryam turned her attention to a lifelong passion, art, in 2003, when she began collecting contemporary art more seriously. Her particular areas of artistic interest and expertise reside in the fields of Modern British Art, Chinese Contemporary Art and Contemporary Iranian Art.
Maryam is both a collector, as well as a patron of the arts, with close affiliations with the newly established British Museum’s Middle Eastern patrons group and the Tate where she co-chairs the MENAAC group (Middle East North Africa Acquisition Committee). She is also closely linked with the Parasol Unit Foundation and the Whitechapel Gallery, where she has contributed to their major expansion program. More recently, she has assisted with the realization of the Summer 2009 exhibition “Iran Inside Out” at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York – a first in the United States.
Maryam’s curatorial expertise and love of Iranian contemporary art were tested in her contributions, as Curatorial Director, to the making of Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art, published in April 2009 by Thames and Hudson. She has also written on the topic of Iranian Contemporary art for various international art related magazines and catalogues.
Aside from her executive editorial role in the creation of Unleashed: Contemporary Art from Turkey, due for publication in April 2010, she is also engaged in the creation of the book entitled, Art and Patronage in the Near and Middle East, due for publication in end 2010. She lives with her husband and two children in London.