Professor Catherine Kessedjian
Professor emerita, University Pantheon-Assas Paris II; Founder and President, Fondation Villa Seurat pour l’Art contemporain
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Catherine is a specialist of dispute resolution, an arbitrator and mediator. While at the University Pantheon-Assas Paris II, she was the founder and Director of Studies of the LLM in European Law. She has taught, notably, conflict of laws as applied to looted art/cultural objects (Unidroit Convention and EU law). She has published extensively on many aspects of international law and is regularly invited to teach specialized seminar in foreign investment, arbitration/mediation for IP issues and other issues of International Law. Catherine is the co-founder of Mediation for better business, President of the French Branch of the International Law Association and Vice-Chair of the Executive Board of the world-wide ILA. She is the founder and president of Fondation Villa Seurat pour l’Art contemporain, which was accredited by the Fondation de France in 2016.
As a practitioner at the Paris Bar (18 years), Catherine has also performed transactional work for many clients of all sizes, in Europe and the United States, among others. She has experience in arbitration, with more than 120 cases in which she participated either as counsel, expert, or arbitrator (chair, sole arbitrator or wing-arbitrator). She has mediated a number of cases between galleries and artists and between galleries and collectors. She also practices preventive-mediation in the area of corporate social responsibility. In 2019 she was appointed conciliator under ICSID (List of France). In 2018, she was coopted to appear on the list of arbitrators of GICAM (Cameroun). She was appointed to the Arbitration and Mediation pools of CAfA in January 2020.
Catherine studied law in France and the United States. She earned a doctoral degree in 1986 from the University Pantheon-Sorbonne Paris I, and became a full tenured professor (agrégée) in 1989. She earned an LLM from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981. She was trained as a mediator in France (AIEM), the UK (CEDR) and the United States (Center for Conflict Understanding).
She has collected art for more than 40 years and has curated exhibitions in The Hague and Paris and has also published two art books. She speaks French, English and Spanish.
Jurisdiction: U.S.A. and France