page_title: Femke Halsema
section_title: Work outside of politics
hierarchical_section_title: Femke Halsema / Career / Work outside of politics
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Femke Halsema tijdens een try out van haar theatercollege 'Een Vrij Land' in Emmen in 2018
context_page_description: Femke Halsema is a Dutch politician and filmmaker. On 27 June 2018 she was appointed Mayor of Amsterdam and began serving a six-year term on 12 July 2018. She is the first woman to hold the position on a non-interim basis. She previously was a member of the House of Representatives for the leftist green party GroenLinks from 1998 to 2011, and served as the party's parliamentary leader from 2002 to 2010.
context_section_description: After she left politics in January 2011, Halsema worked as freelancer: she has been active as an administrator, member of advisory committees, in science, as an author and television creator.
  Immediately after her political career, Halsema joined De Volkskrant, for which she wrote number of articles and columns in 2011 and 2012. In 2013 she was involved in De Correspondent, for which she also wrote articles for two years. In 2016 she wrote her political memoir Pluche. In 2017 she wrote the Essay Nergensland. Nieuw Licht op migratie ("Nowhereland. A new light on migration"), where she proposed a utopian alternative to the international refugee question. In 2018 she wrote the essay Macht en Verbeelding ("Power and Imagination").
  In 2011 she became professor by special appointment at Tilburg University occupying the Leonardo Chair for half a year. She taught at the Tilburg School of Humanities. In 2012 she became a temporary professor at University of Utrecht, occupying the Peace of Utrecht Chair. She researched the meaning of social media for human rights and democracy.
  In December 2012 she led an inquiry into the behaviour of administrators at the school board of Amarantis. She succeeded Martin van Rijn, who had become junior minister of Health. The committee Halsema found that the board had acted within the law but that their behaviour was not desirable. After that she led a committee on the governance code for the semi-public sector at the request of the Minister of Economic Affairs Henk Kamp The final report of the committee concluded that a governance code would not lead to the desired culture change in the semi-public sector. The committee focused its attention on the old boys network and political cooperation. In 2015 she was asked by employees and students at the University of Amsterdam to lead the committee concerning the financial policy of the University. After a month she returned the assignment. The committee felt that elementary conditions were not met for independent, careful research. Since January 2018, Halsema at the request of the Council of the Judiciary chair of the quadrennial review committee.
  Since 2011, Halsema has been President-Commissioner at WPG Uitgevers, which is among other responsible for the publisher De Bezige Bij, Vrij Nederland and Voetbal International. Since 2015 Halsema has been chair for the Trade Organisation for Healthcare for the Handicapped (VGN). Because of that office she is chair of the Executive Consultation for Healthcare (BOZ), a partnership between employers' organisations and patients' organisations in the realm of healthcare. In addition to this she has a number of functions in the public and private sector: between 2012 and 2014 she was chair of the Advisory Council of ASN Bank. Since 2015 she is a member of the board the Start Foundation, a fund for people who have "distance to the labour market". And since 2016 she has been a commissioner at Independer. 
  Additionally, Halsema has been a member of the executive of a number of non-profits: between 2011 and 2017 she was chair of the board of Stichting Vluchteling. Since 2017, she has been chair of the board of Aidsfonds/Stopaidsnow. She chairs the board of Adelheid Roosen's theatre company and of IDFA.
  In 2014 Halsema made the six-part documentary series Seks en de Zonde ("Sex and Sin") with Hassnae Bouazza about women in the Islamic world. She interviewed activists Veena Malik and Souad al-Shammary for this. Together with Gijs van de Westelaken, she developed and produced the TV-series De Fractie ("The Parliamentary Party") about politics in The Hague. Recently she has been working with her partner Robert Oey on a documentary series on terrorism. In the Spring of 2017, she made a theatre tour with her theatre-lecture Een Vrij Land ("A Free Country").
caption: Halsema during a preview of her theatre-lecture Een Vrij Land in 2018
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