Joost Vander Auwera
Dr. Joost Vander Auwera (born 24 January 1957) is a Belgian art historian and museum curator. He is an acknowledged expert on Seventeenth Century Flemish painting and the leading expert on the paintings of Jacob Jordaens, Abraham Janssens, and Sebastian Vrancx. Vander Auwera was born in Bruges and graduated from Ghent University, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D after research and dissertations on the Flemish Baroque painters Sebastian Vrancx and Abraham Janssens. He also received an M.B.A. from the Vlerick Business School. He is Senior Curator at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium  in Brussels. He is the Co-Founder and Project Leader of the international multidisciplinary Jordaens Van Dyck Panel Paintings Project and the Project Leader for the establishment of the visitors centre at the Brueghel House, Brussels. Vander Auwera has authored some 75 publications on 17th Century Flemish painting and museum administration. With Dr. Sabine van Sprang, he curated the exhibition "Rubens. A Genius at Work", 2007-8 at the Brussels museum. In 2012-3, he co-curated the first exhibition on Jacob Jordaens held in Brussels since 1928 and the first in Germany (it showed in both Brussels and the  Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel), "Jordaens and the Antique""." He was a contributing author to the "Jordaens 1593-1678" exhibition catalogue, Petit Palais, Paris, in 2013. He is a Vice President of the UNESCO International Committee on the History of Art.