Josien Pieterse

Josien is, together with Cas Bool, founder and co-director of Framer Framed. Framer Framed is a platform for art and culture, with an exhibition space in Amsterdam. Their exhibitions are located at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture and politics. The exhibitions present work by known and unknown artists, who are active worldwide and address social issues. When organizing exhibitions, Framer Framed offers a platform to both established curators and new names. In addition to each exhibition, an in-depth, interdisciplinary public program takes place, consisting of artist talks, lectures, film screenings, performances and publications.

In 2018 Framer Framed opened an art and community space ‘Werkplaats Molenwijk’ for the Molenwijk neighborhood in Amsterdam North. Each year Werkplaats Molenwijk offers artist in residence for two artists to work on new projects.

In addition to many public symposia, Josien realized more than 60 exhibitions on behalf of Framer Framed, including the first Dutch pavilion at the 14th Gwanju Biennale in South Korea with various international guest curators.

Josien Pieterse was founder and ten years director of Network Democracy, a platform for democratic innovation. In 2014, she received the oeuvre prize, ‘Radical Innovators’, from the journalistic magazine Vrij Nederland for her work with Network Democracy. Network Democracy co-initiated the whistleblower website PubLeaks, widely supported by a range of national newspapers and magazines. She was also the initiator of Voorjebuurt, a crowdfunding platform for neighborhood initiatives. Both PubLeaks and Voorjebuurt are now independent foundations.

Josien Pieterse on behalf of Network Democracy initiated the New Democracy, a running series of 50 panel discussions in collaboration with Pakhuis De Zwijger. and a board member of the European Civic Forum (Brussels). Josien is chair of the Consul Democracy Foundation, which is based on a democracy platform developed by the municipality of Madrid: an open source, shareable and privacy-aware tool for direct democracy and economic empowerment of citizens. In 2018, Network Democracy received second prize from the annual Innovation Award from the Internet Society.

Josien encourages public conversation and has designed hundreds of programs in recent years. For many years, she was chair of the Association of Dutch Debate Centers and coordinator of the Forum for Democratic Development, focusing on stimulating citizens’ initiatives and public debate. She also worked as a curator of public programs for Felix Meritis and Utrecht’s debate platform Tumult. Josien was board member of the Keti Koti Tables and chair of the (A)WAKE program foundation of MONO (Rotterdam).

From 2007-2017, Josien worked as an independent oral historian and researcher at Atria, an institute for emancipation and women’s history in Amsterdam. Josien directed two documentaries about the women’s movement: Fem.doc (2002) – about the legacy of the second feminist wave – and Women’s Health Movement and Discovering and Renewing (2008) – about the rise of the women’s health movement. She did research and interview projects with women from the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), pioneers of safe-houses for women (Blijf van m’n Lijf-huizen), feminists within the church and female victims of abuse within the Catholic Church. Josien started Atria’s oral history archive (in video) together with Grietje Keller and Saskia Wieringa, and she was also involved in the methodological development of the archive.