Jasia Reichardt

From 1974 to 1976 Reichardt was director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Between 1989 and 1998 she was one of the directors of Artec biennale in Nagoya. In 1998 she curated Electronically Yours, an exhibition of electronic portraiture at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Apart from writing and organising exhibitions, she broadcast on the arts programme, "Critics’ Forum" for the BBC, 1965 – 1977. She collaborated with artists and continued to focus on the intersection of the arts and science on which she wrote a monthly column in the New Scientist. After 1990, she collaborated on various projects with Nick Wadley, until his death in 2017. She has taught at the Architectural Association and other colleges. After 1988, she organised the archive of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson; the 3 volume catalogue of the archive was published in 2020 and distributed by MIT.

In 1968, she organised the ground-breaking Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, and edited the special issue of Studio International, which replaced the catalogue. The same year, she curated Fluorescent Chrysanthemum, an exhibition of contemporary experimental Japanese art. Other exhibitions followed, including Play Orbit of objects to play with by British artists.

In the 1950s she was assistant editor of Art News and Review, for which she wrote numerous reviews, as well as exhibition introductions for various galleries of contemporary art. In the early 1960s she was the general editor of the "Art in Progress" series published by Methuen. She organised various exhibitions of new art, and in 1963 – 1971 was assistant director of the ICA

Jasia Reichardt (born 1933) is a British art critic, curator, art gallery director, teacher and prolific writer, specialist in the emergence of computer art. In 1968 she was curator of the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is generally known for her work on experimental art. After the deaths of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson she catalogued their archive and looks after their legacy.

Jasia Reichardt was born to Maryla and Seweryn Chaykin in Warsaw, Poland, in 1933. Her mother was an illustrator and pianist and her father an architect and engineer. An assimilated middle-class Jewish family, they were overwhelmed by the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and were incarcerated among the capital's Jewish population in the Warsaw Ghetto. Jasia survived there for a while with her mother and grandmother who tried to shield her from the unfolding horror. In 1942 she was smuggled out, but both her parents were murdered in the Holocaust. She was subsequently hidden under an assumed identity by a series of Poles, spending time in a convent, until she was able to join her mother's sister, Franciszka Themerson, and her husband, Stefan Themerson, in London in 1946. She attended Dartington Hall school. and then went to study production at the Old Vic Theatre School in London.