Bénédicte Savoy

Bénédicte Savoy (French: Bénédicte Savoy [beneˈdiktə savˈwa] , born 22 May 1972 in Paris) is a French art historian, specialising in the critical enquiry of the provenance of works of art, including looted art and other forms of illegally acquired cultural objects.

Savoy is professor of modern art history at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. From 2016 to 2021, she was professor for cultural history of European Artistic Heritage from the 18th to 20th centuries at the Collège de France in Paris. Commissioned by the French president in 2018, she and economist and writer Felwine Sarr from Senegal are the authors of a report on the restitution of African cultural heritage. As a high school student, Savoy attended the Beethoven-Gymnasium in West Berlin in 1988/89. She then studied German language and civilisation at the École Normale Supérieure in Fontenay, France, which she completed in 1994 with a master's thesis on the visual artist Anselm Kiefer. In 1996, she received the agrégation (license to teach in French high schools).

From 1998 to 2001, she was research assistant at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and lecturer both at the Technical University and the Free University in Berlin. In 2000, she received her doctorate from the University of Paris VIII with a dissertation on French art theft in Germany. From 2003 to 2009, Savoy was a junior professor at the Institute for History and Art History at Technical University of Berlin. Since 2009, she has been professor of modern art history at the same university.Savoy is a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. After a series of lectures as a guest lecturer in June 2015, Savoy was appointed professor at the Collège de France in 2016: She held the chair of Histoire culturelle du patrimoine artistique en Europe, XVIIIe-XXe siècles until 2021.