Marien van der Heijden (1958) studied Art History at the University of Utrecht. He started working at the International Institute of Social History in 1984, with the Image and Sound department. From 1990 to 1995 he worked at the National Trades Union Museum in Amsterdam, where he organized exhibitions on social history and social art. Returning to the IISH, he became responsible for collecting posters, prints, photographs and other visual documents, and continued making exhibitions, such as The Chairman Smiles , with propaganda posters from the former Soviet Union, Cuba and China (Amsterdam 1996). This exhibition marked the start of his cooperation with Stefan Landsberger, and also was the first exhibition he presented on the World Wide Web.

Van der Heijden headed the department of Digital Projects at the IISH from 2000 until mid 2008. Since then, he has been working on several web and digitization projects, such as the 'Centrale' Digitization Project - which included the papers of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. From 2014 he is head of the department of Collection Development. He has remained responsible for the Institute's collection of Chinese propaganda posters. He is treasurer of the Chinese Posters Foundation.

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Marien van der Heijden