Andrea Danese is a partner and co-founder of Artem Advisors LLC. Most recently, Andrea was co-founder, President & CEO of Athena Art Finance Corp. He co-founded the company in February 2015. Athena Art Finance is a specialty lender for the art market providing non-recourse financing against art as collateral. Lead investors in Athena were Carlyle Private Equity and Pictet Bank. The company was sold to Yield Street Inc. in April 2019. Over a 4 years period, Athena grew to be the leading independent lender in the art market with more than $250mm of assets originated and a market recognized innovative methodology to manage risk in a highly illiquid and opaque asset class like art.
From 2009 to 2014, Andrea was Global Head of Enterprise Content and Distribution at Bloomberg LP leading the enterprise reference data, real-time data, distribution, and pricing services groups. In his Global Head capacity Andrea led a team of 900 people with a global presence in 10 countries and $1bn in revenues. Andrea was also responsible for the development of Bloomberg Valuation Services, or BVAL, an evaluated pricing service for corporate and government credit products and derivatives.
Prior to joining Bloomberg, Andrea spent 16 years in the financial services industry. He started his career in London structuring credit products (CDOs and CLOs) for JP Morgan, and also served as Chief Operating Officer of Deutsche Bank's Global Credit Derivatives business. He moved to New York in 2000 to be President and Chief Operating Officer of Creditex, Inc., a credit derivatives electronic trading platform sold to Intercontinental Exchange in 2008. He also served as Tullet Prebon Information Chief Executive Officer and then as managing partner and co-founder of Fusion Advisory Partners, Inc. Andrea earned a Juris Doctorate (JD) degree from the University of Rome and a Master of Laws (LLM) in International Business Law from Queen Mary and Westfield College at University of London. He has an active presence in the art market with speaking engagements at industry conferences, panels and advising many market participants on art and finance. Previously he was a leading figure in the financial market data industry, and he continues to be an active angel investor in the FinTech space. Andrea is a contributor and speaker at Columbia Law School in NYC in the Law and Finance of the Art Market course and an Associate Professor at the Universita’ Cattolica in Milan, Italy. Andrea is a passionate art collector, and he sponsors and supports multiple artists. He is involved in a number of immersive art, theatre and movie ventures. He is also an avid runner and cyclist competing in both disciplines.
