Lord (Neil) Mendoza was Landmark’s Chair of Trustees between 2011 and 2021 and became an Ambassador in 2022. In 2020 he was appointed by the government as Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal, in response to the impact of Coronavirus on the cultural sector. Neil was conferred with a Life Peerage by Her Majesty the Queen in October 2020 and holds the title of The Lord Mendoza of King's Reach in the City of London.
Neil is Non-Executive Director at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, where he led the year-long Mendoza Review of Museums in England (2016-17) and a review for the Cabinet Office on the national museums. Neil was elected Provost for Oriel College, Oxford University in 2018. He is also Chair of the Electors for the Slade Professor of Fine Art, on the Board of the Ashmolean Museum, on the Vice-Chancellor’s Cultural Advisory Council and a member of the Innovation Working Group. Neil is also Chair of The Illuminated River Foundation and he joined the Board of Meira GTx, a US-based gene therapy company, in 2015 and continues to act as a consultant for Bookmark Content, the company he founded as Forward Publishing in the 1980s.
In his career, he has also worked in banking, film, publishing and marketing. Neil is an advocate of supporting talent, creativity and enterprise through high quality educational, cultural and heritage engagement. In previous roles as a Commissioner of Historic England, Chair of Children and the Arts, and Vice-Chair of Soho Theatre, he oversaw significant transformation during a period of change for these organisations. Neil is also a mentor to young professionals across a range of sectors.