Rieke van Leeuwen studied art history at Groningen University. She was curator of the Mauritshuis, Royal Cabinet of Paintings in the Hague for a decade before she started working at the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (The Hague) in 1994. She became head of digital collections of the RKD in 2001 and co-developed the infrastructure of art-historical information in RKD Explore.
In 2013 she became project manager of the Gerson Digital, a research program of the RKD, which is scheduled for its completion in 2023. This project concerns the dispersal and impact of 17th-century art from the Netherlands outside the Low Countries. Since January 2019 Rieke also is an external PhD candidate at Utrecht University with Prof. Thijs Weststeijn on the subject Patterns in the transnational mobility of artists from the Low Countries 1400-1800, in which data collected for the Gerson project of the RKD are being analysed.
The dispersal of Dutch (blue) and Flemish (red) artists until 1800. Source: RKDMaps and RKDartists&, reference date February 2019