After spending five years as director of the Swedish National Museums of World Culture (Statens museer för världskultur) in Gothenburg, since February 2015 she has headed Sweden's Nordic Museum in Stockholm.
Interested in history while still young, she studied classical archaeology at the University of Copenhagen as well as in Freiburg and Cambridge.
During the course of her studies, Houby-Nielsen spent extended periods in the Mediterranean countries, especially Greece, Cyprus and Tunisia.
In the late 1980s, she met her husband-to-be, the Swedish archaeologist Anders Andrén (born 1952).
[4] In 1997, Houby-Nielsen was appointed head of the Royal Cast Collection at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.