Gallery owner Irina Johnstone, MBA ’10 (EXP-15), recently codirected her first documentary.
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- February 18, 2026
- Media, Entertainment, and Sports
An Ambitious Plan Opens a Creative Universe
Three years ago, Irina Johnstone, MBA ’10 (EXP-15), had a chance meeting in her London-based art gallery, Three Highgate, with the daughter of George Claessen, a painter and poet.
Born in 1909 to a Dutch Burgher family in Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—Claessen was a founding member of the ’43 Group, a Sri Lankan artists’ collective that was active between 1943 and the mid-1960s. Claessen emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1949, where he worked as a draftsman to supplement his painting and poetry. He died in 1999.
Claessen’s story resonated with Johnstone on a number of levels.
“There are some biographical parallels between Claessen and me,” she says. “He worked in one sphere—the business world—while quietly building a completely different creative universe with his art and poetry. That duality and the quiet belief in your own work even when it isn’t widely recognized are what I related to the most.”
Johnstone grew up in Russia, earned a degree in literature from the Moscow State Institute of Culture, and moved to the United Kingdom in the early ’90s. After earning a second degree from London’s University of Law, she joined Deutsche Bank’s London office, where she eventually became a managing director.
Midway through her 15-year career there and feeling that she needed to bulk up her business résumé, she enrolled in Booth’s Executive MBA Program in London, where classes in social capital with Ronald S. Burt and negotiations with Linda E. Ginzel changed her thinking about the relationship between business and art.
“Ron’s work in particular—the idea that value is often created by connecting clusters that don’t normally speak to each other—made a huge impression on me,” she says.
“Every artist needs a network—or maybe tribe is a better word.”
— Irina Johnstone
Always ready for new experiences and endeavors, she opened her gallery in 2020. “Every artist needs a network—or maybe tribe is a better word,” she says. “My goal is for Three Highgate to grow into an art foundation that provides support to artists, filmmakers, and writers in a meaningful way and also in a way that lasts beyond me. Somewhat ambitious, I know.”
Her meeting with George Claessen’s daughter led to an exhibition of his work at the gallery in 2023, which, in turn, sparked Johnstone’s first film project, Babel to Abstraction, a documentary about Claessen’s life and work that she codirected with documentary filmmaker Rob Lemkin.
“I’m learning the craft as I go,” she says. “On Babel to Abstraction, I worked as a cowriter, coresearcher, and codirector. It was hands-on from the beginning.”
Again, her Booth training proved invaluable. “Negotiating, getting to a zone of possible agreement, mobilizing the troops, scheduling, and raising money are all things I know how to do,” she says.
Completed in 2024, the film recently won Best Documentary Feature at the Love & Hope International Film Festival in Barcelona, an experience Johnstone describes as surreal. “We were one of 20 nominees and did not expect to win. I had to make up my speech on the spot,” she says.
Since then, the film has won or been nominated for several other awards, and Johnstone is in the early stages of setting up a second film project.
Ronald S. Burt is the Charles M. Harper Leadership Professor of Sociology and Strategy Emeritus. Linda E. Ginzel is clinical professor of managerial psychology.
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