Jan Müller (born 1967) is a media archive executive and former advertising executive.

Early life and education

Jan Müller was born in 1967 in

Soest, Netherlands Soest () is a Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality and town in the central Netherlands, in the province of Utrecht (province), Utrecht. It is about west of Amersfoort. Population centres The town of Soest The oldest documents me ...

, as the son of the chief sound technician at the

Nederlandse Omroep Stichting The (; NOS or rarely ; ) is one of the broadcasting organisations making up the Dutch public broadcasting system. It has a special statutory obligation to make news and sports programmes for the three Dutch public television channels and the ...

(National Broadcasting Foundation). At age four, Müller and his family moved to the town of

Huizen Huizen () is a municipality and a village in the province of North Holland, the Netherlands. The name "Huizen" is Dutch for "houses" and this usage has been linked to the belief that the first stone houses in the region, instead of the more commo ...

in the Dutch province

North Holland North Holland (, ) is a Provinces of the Netherlands, province of the Netherlands in the northwestern part of the country. It is located on the North Sea, north of South Holland and Utrecht (province), Utrecht, and west of Friesland and Flevola ...

, where he grew up and completed primary and secondary education. After graduating the atheneum, he studied commercial economics at the Hogeschool voor Economische Studies (University of Applied Sciences for Economics) in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...

Career

After graduation, Müller started a career in the advertising business. Eventually he became general director at the Dutch branch of

Saatchi & Saatchi Saatchi and Saatchi is a British multinational communications and advertising agency network with 114 offices in 76 countries and over 6,500 staff. It was founded in 1970 and is currently headquartered in London. The parent company of the agency ...

in 2003. He was from 2006 until 2010 board member of the

Stichting Ideële Reclame A () is a Dutch legal entity with limited liability, not aiming to make profit, with no members or share capital, that exists for a specific purpose that is serving a public, social or an idealistic interest. A stichting is allowed to make profit ...

SIRE (Foundation for Idealistic Advertising), a national foundation that runs advertising campaigns in the public interest. In 2009 Müller successfully applied, without direct professional experience in the heritage or broadcasting sector, for the position of general director of the

Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision The Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision (, ''NIBG'') is an archive center and museum located in Hilversum. It collects, preserves, and provides access to most of the Dutch audiovisual collection. In total, the institute has more than 750,000 hou ...

, the multimedia archive and museum of the national broadcasters. As director, he was responsible for the digitization efforts of the archive, a reorganization after significant budget cuts and the 2017 merger with the Dutch Press Museum. He is credited to have played an essential role in growing the archive into a world player in media culture. Müller was one of the co-founders of the Media Memory Foundation in 2010, aiming to create a new archive for oral history. Between 2011 and 2013, he was chairman of the Dutch Advertising Archive and Museum, ReclameArsenaal, between 2013 and 2016 supervisory board member of the Press Museum (which would shortly thereafter merge with Sound and Vision) and from 2010 to 2012 executive council member and from 2012 to 2016 president at the International Federation of Television Archives. From 2015 he was board member of the

Europeana Foundation Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought togethe ...

and from 2016 until he moved to Australia in 2017, he was chairman. In 2017, Müller was appointed as chief executive director of the

National Film and Sound Archive The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), known as ScreenSound Australia from 1999 to 2004, is Australia's audiovisual archive, responsible for developing, preserving, maintaining, promoting, and providing access to a national c ...

with a mission to help it digitize and to establish a national centre of excellence. He served in the position from October 2017 until the end of 2020, when he returned to the Netherlands in during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. During the term of this appointment, in 2018 he joined the advisory board of the Centre for Media History at

Macquarie University Macquarie University ( ) is a Public university, public research university in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the Sydney metropolitan area. ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Müller, Jan Dutch chief executives in the mass media industry Directors of museums in the Netherlands Australian archivists 1967 births Living people