Prof. Jan Paul Crielaard has been appointed director of the Netherlands Institute in Athens by the Executive Board of the University of Amsterdam. He will take up his post on 1 March 2026, succeeding Prof. Ann Brysbaert, who is continuing her career in Belgium after almost four years as director of the NIA. Jan Paul Crielaard is Professor of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology of the Mediterranean at VU University Amsterdam. He lectures in the programmes of the Amsterdam Centre for Ancient Studies and Archaeology (ACASA), a partnership between VU University Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam, and has also held various coordinating roles within ACASA. Crielaard was acting director of the NIA between 1991 and 1993 and is now returning to Athens, where he has built up a broad network of contacts at other foreign institutes, government organisations, and archaeological, heritage and knowledge institutions. In addition to his directorship, he will remain affiliated with the VU one day a week.

Jan Paul Crielaard (1964) obtained his doctorate (cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam with a thesis entitled “The Euboeans Overseas. Long-distance Contacts and Colonisation as Status Activities in Early Iron Age Greece” (1996). He was a postdoctoral researcher at the same university. In 2016, he was a visiting lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Earlier this year, he was a residential scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. His research focuses on the early Iron Age and the Archaic period, often combining written and archaeological information. He has published extensively on topics such as intercultural contacts within the Mediterranean region, Greek colonisation, elites and elite behaviour, ethnicity, and archaeology and the Homeric epic. He has conducted fieldwork in Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and Italy, and was co-director of the L’Amastuola field project in Puglia, Italy. Since 2010, he has led the Plakari Archaeological Project in Karystos and the Southern Euboia Sea and Land Routes Projects, both on the island of Euboea, Greece.

Until 1 March 2026, Willem Ledeboer will act as interim director of the NIA.