MELANIE GRANT

Melanie Grant has been a journalist for over 20 years having worked at The Times, The FT, The Independent, The Guardian, The BBC and at The Economist where she spent 16 years overseeing luxury content and photography for 1843 Magazine, their lifestyle sister publication. She joined the Responsible Jewellery Council as Executive Director in January 2023 and here she oversees a team of 28 with nearly 1700 members in 71 countries.  She has become the authority on jewellery as art and commodity, writing articles and giving talks at institutions such as The Science Museum, The V&A, The British Museum, PAD, Sarabande, The GIA, New York Jewelry Week, The MFA Boston, Masterpiece, Christies, Sotheby’s and Mayfair Art Weekend.

She guest lecturers at Central Saint Martin’s and in her spare time she writes for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Tatler, The Goldsmith’s Company and The Natural Diamond Council.  She wrote her first book Coveted on jewellery, art and economics, published by Phaidon in October 2020 and also the foreword for Winged Beauty published by ACC Art Books in October 2021 on the life and work of pioneering jewellery artist Wallace Chan. Melanie sits on the boards of New York Jewelry Week, The Black in Jewelry Coalition, The Copenhagen Commitment, an NGO dedicated to the ethical evolution of jewellery and ISEAL, the global membership organisation for credible sustainability standards.

The British Society of Magazine Editors gave her an award in July 2021 and in March 2022, she won The Media Excellence category of The Gem Awards voted for by the Jewelers of America.  She made her first piece of jewellery with the Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery in November 2021 as a series of eight cuffs called ‘Self’ and she has started to curate, first for Sotheby’s New York, in conjunction with The Serpentine Galleries, for TEFAF Maastricht and Kensington Palace in their largest exhibition to date Crown to Couture.  She is an author, writer and curator and her specialist subject is the art and economics of jewellery.