Helen Hillyard is a British curator and art historian specialising in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art. She is Head of Collection at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.
Hillyard is known for her curatorial and scholarly work on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art through her research and exhibitions.
Hillyard studied History of art at the University of Cambridge and later completed postgraduate study at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she wrote a thesis on the display of contemporary art in historic contexts.
After her studies, Hillyard joined the National Gallery in London as a curatorial trainee in the 2013âÂÂ14 National Gallery Curatorial Traineeship Programme. Through that scheme, she also worked on a project at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where she helped rehang the Baroque galleries.
Hillyard joined the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2015 as Assistant Curator. She became Acting Curator in April 2021 and was appointed Curator later that year. In 2020, she contributed to the complete re-presentation of the gallery's collection, described as its most ambitious rehang since 2013.
Her curatorial work has focused on Dutch and Flemish Old Master painting, storytelling in museum display, and developing ways of making historic collections relevant and accessible to contemporary audiences.
At Dulwich, she has described her curation as a form of mediation between the past and the present, inviting new public engagement with the collection.
In 2024 she became Head of Collection.
Hillyard co-curated the exhibition Rembrandt's Light (2019âÂÂ2020) with Jennifer Scott and contributed to its accompanying catalogue. In 2025, she curated Anna Ancher: Painting Light, which was the first major UK exhibition dedicated to the Danish painter Anna Ancher.