S9E2: Melanie Keen

Melanie Keen is the director of Wellcome Collection

Before she interviewed for the job, Keen visited the permanent exhibition and noticed a set of ethnographic photographs:

They’re sort of hidden in a corner discreetly, but the images themselves aren’t discreet at all. I found them offensive, you know. In no other space in that building where the images of naked black women, of semi-naked black men, and the person that was attributed was a white male photographer. They were attributed as being from a particular community or tribe of people.

And when I started the job, I walked around one with one of the curators and I was like, “That’s just got to go. It’s got to go. It’s not — until we can find out more about those people that are represented in the photograph. It has to go.”

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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.