Ambassador Joanne Doornewaard joined the Foreign Service in 1992, after working as a landscape architect in Amsterdam, Indonesia, and Thailand. After several junior posts in the Ministry, she represented the Netherlands in Mexico City as head of the political, press, and cultural affairs department at the Netherlands Embassy from 1998-2003. From 2003-2008 she worked at the Netherlands Embassy in Warsaw, Poland. An interesting time as Poland had just entered the European. She was responsible for energy and bilateral trade issues.
In 2008, after 10 years abroad, she returned to the Netherlands where she became project manager for international energy affairs at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, responsible for energy security policy. In 2011 she moved back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as deputy director of Communications. From 2011-2015 she headed the news management bureau and set up the Newsroom. In 2015 she left the Netherlands and moved to Colombo, Sri Lanka as the new Ambassador. And in 2019 she was accredited as the Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to South Korea. Ambassador Doornewaard is married and has two daughters.