Katlijne Van der Stighelen

Katlijne Van der Stighelen (1959) studied at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven). She wrote her master’s thesis on the famous polyglot and artist Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678). In 1984, she became a Junior research fellow at the Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (National Fund for Scientific Research-NFWO) in order to write a PhD on the portraits of the Antwerp painter Cornelis de Vos. Between 1988 and 1994 she was a Senior research fellow of the NFWO. Her research focused on the first Antwerp period of Anthony van Dyck. In 1995 she became an Associate Professor at KU Leuven where she was appointed as a Full Professor in 2007. In 1999 she and Mirjam Westen of the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem curated the first exhibition on Women Artists in Belgium and The Netherlands, 1500-1950, entitled Elck zijn waerom /A chacun son grâce (published in Dutch and French). In the Fall of 2002 she was holder of the Rubens Chair at Berkeley, University of California. Meanwhile she published widely on different aspects of Flemish art in general and Flemish portraiture in particular. In 2018 she curated an exhibition on Michaelina Wautier in the MAS Museum in Antwerp (Katlijne Van der Stighelen (ed.), Michaelina Wautier 1604-1689. Glorifying a Forgotten Talent, BAI Publishers, Antwerp, 2018). Recently she completed volume XIX.3. of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard on Rubens’s Unidentified Portraits (with Hans Vlieghe as co-author). She is currently collaborating on an exhibition on Michaelina Wautier at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and The Royal Academy in London (2025-2026) and will co-curate with Anna Orlando the exhibition Van Dyck l’Europeo at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, opening in Spring 2026.