Quick Facts
Biography
Dimitris Daskalopoulos is an entrepreneur, the founder and Chairman of DAMMA Holdings SA, a financial services and investment company. He served as the Chairman of the Board of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV) for 8 consecutive years (2006-2014). He is SEV’s Honorary President.
From 2013 to 2015 he served as BUSINESSEUROPE’s Vice President and from 1983 to 2007 he was the principal owner, Chairman and CEO of Delta Holdings/Vivartia SA, Greece’s largest food conglomerate. He is the founder and Chairman of diaNEOsis (2015), a research think tank in Greece, which commissions studies and makes policy proposals on the major social and economic issues in Greece.
Dimitris Daskalopoulos is a collector of contemporary art, D.Daskalopoulos Collection (1994). He is also a Vice President of the Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Chairman of the Collections Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and an active member of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Tate International Council and the Leadership Council of the New Museum and a founding partner of the Whitechapel’s Future Fund (2011).He is the founder of NEON (2013), a non-profit organization, which works to bring contemporary culture in Greece closer to everyone. Thematic exhibitions based on his collection have been presented at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010-2011), the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2011) and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2012-2013).
In 2014 ICI honored Dimitris Daskalopoulos with the 2014 Leo Award. The award acknowledged his visionary approach to collecting, through the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, and his work in establishing NEON. In 2018, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation honored Dimitris Daskalopoulos at the 2018 Guggenheim International Gala for his innovative philanthropy in the arts.