Josien Pieterse is co-founder and co-director of Framer Framed, a platform for art and culture with an exhibition space in Amsterdam. Its exhibitions sit at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, and politics, presenting work by international artists engaged with social issues. Each exhibition is accompanied by an interdisciplinary public programme of talks, lectures, film screenings, and performances. On behalf of Framer Framed, Josien has realised dozens of exhibitions with international guest curators, including the first Dutch pavilion at the 14th Gwangju Biennale. Since 2017, Framer Framed has been part of the Basic Infrastructure of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
Josien was also founder and ten-year director of Network Democracy, a platform for democratic innovation, for which she received the ‘Radical Innovators’ oeuvre prize from Vrij Nederland in 2014.
She holds board positions at MOKER, De Zaak Nu, and ACI, and chairs the Consul Democracy Foundation. She was formerly chair of the Association of Dutch Debate Centers.
From 2007–2017, Josien worked as an oral historian and researcher at Atria, institute for emancipation and women’s history, directing two documentaries and conducting research on the women’s movement.