Merel van Helsdingen

Short biography

Founder and Managing Director of Nxt Museum, the Home of New Media Art in Amsterdam. Merel van Helsdingen founded Nxt Museum in 2020 as the first museum dedicated to New Media Art in The Netherlands bringing together Arts & Technology. She is on a mission to constantly push the boundaries of what a museum can be in the digital age by bridging the gap between the digital & physical world as well offering a space for research, education, experiment and creation. Previously she worked at Apple, Bartle Bogle & Hegarty and PVH on digital marketing strategy, business development and cultural partnerships with music and entertainment companies such as Rovio, Disney, YouTube and Universal Music in London and Amsterdam. Merel’s background in new media, film and music, combined with her entrepreneurial flair, inspired the idea for Nxt Museum in 2018. Over the last four years, Merel has built the museum from scratch, leading on everything from the concept to branding, fundraising and artist liaison, with the support of her network of advisors. Merel is also part of the advisory board of several digital and cultural initiatives in The Netherlands: Digital Arts Festival Schemerlicht and Interactive theatre company Stichting Obscure. Nxt Museum – the home of new media art opened in Amsterdam in August 2020 and is the first museum in the Netherlands fully dedicated to art, technology, science & sound. Nxt Museum exhibits and commissions ambitious, large-scale new media art installations born of interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, designers, technologists, sound builders and scientists. The museum’s three-fold programme, comprising exhibitions, performance and education, are designed to appeal to a broad range of visitors and their interests – from music and sound to performance art, dance, creative coding, NFT’s and Web 3.0 and more – and is consistently led by the museum’s mission to seek, show and question what’s next.