Carmel Allen

Currently advising the Royal Shakespeare Company, she was previously managing director of the Tate galleries and CEO of Tate Commerce including Tate Publishing.  

Graduating in Geography, Art and Archaeology, she first worked as an archaeologist in Italy returning to London to start a career in consumer journalism at the Financial Times, then Conde Nast (Vogue and Tatler) and Time Inc. (InStyle and Living). This piqued a fascination for customer behaviour and trend-forecasting, leading to creative directorships roles, working with Sir Terence Conran at The Conran Shop and Lord Snowdon at Linley. Described as a ‘retail anthropologist’, she was awarded the HG Retailer of the Year in 2016 for the Modern Craft Market at Heal’s, while at Linley she founded a Summer School to give young students the opportunity to hone hands-on craft skills in marquetry. She still supports craft education and the school (now the Snowdon School of Fine Furniture) has a permanent home and forms part of The King’s Foundation at Highgrove.  

Her ability to mix commercial acumen with creative sensibility has been key to developing new cultural enterprise models for driving profit with purpose.  

In 2003 Carmel co-founded Kiss It Better, a campaign to fund research into solid mass tumours in children, with Great Ormond Street Children’s Charity and Estee Lauder Companies, and continues to fundraise for the charity.  

Carmel Allen is a member of the Booker Prize Foundation’s board of trustees.