Massimiliano Gioni Named Director of the New Museum, Only the Third in Its History

Massimiliano Gioni has been named as the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum in New York, stepping into the institution’s chief executive role after a decade as its Artistic Director. Massimiliano Gioni succeeds Lisa Phillips, who led the museum for 27 years and is stepping down. He becomes only the third director in the museum’s 49-year history, following founder Marcia Tucker in 1977 and Phillips in 1999.

Only the Third Director in New Museum History

That continuity is the story here. In nearly five decades, the New Museum has changed its top leadership exactly twice before now — a genuinely rare stability for a contemporary art institution, and one that makes Massimiliano Gioni’s appointment a significant transition rather than a routine executive change. Phillips’ 27-year tenure spanned the museum’s entire modern institutional history: more than 175 exhibitions featuring over 700 artists from 70-plus countries, over 2,000 public programs, the museum’s move into its first permanent home — the SANAA-designed building on the Bowery, opened in 2007 — and now the OMA-designed expansion that reopened this spring.

Gioni’s Curatorial Legacy — From Venice to the Bowery

Massimiliano Gioni joined the New Museum in 2006 as Director of Special Exhibitions and was named Edlis Neeson Artistic Director in 2014, leading the curatorial team and the full exhibition program since. He remains simultaneously Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan — a dual role that reflects a curatorial reputation built well beyond New York. His international résumé includes curating the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, along with the Berlin Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, and Manifesta 5.

At the New Museum, he organized major group exhibitions including After Nature (2008), Ostalgia (2011), Here and Elsewhere (2014), The Keeper (2016), and Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (2021), the latter originally conceived by Okwui Enwezor and completed with Naomi Beckwith, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash following Enwezor’s death. Gioni also established the New Museum Triennial in 2009, launched as The Generational: Younger Than Jesus and now the museum’s signature recurring exhibition, with its sixth edition set for winter 2027.

The appointment lands weeks after the New Museum’s $82 million expansion reopened on March 21 of 2026, roughly doubling its exhibition space with a new OMA-designed building. Its inaugural exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future, curated by Gioni himself, brings together more than 200 artists from over 56 countries — contemporary figures including Precious Okoyomon, Wangechi Mutu, and Philippe Parreno placed in dialogue with 20th-century artists like Francis Bacon and Salvador Dalí. Massimiliano Gioni steps into the director role having just delivered the most ambitious exhibition of his tenure, inside the building he helped shape.

Founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, the New Museum’s mission is simply “New Art, New Ideas” — an avowedly non-collecting institution whose identity is built entirely around its exhibition program rather than a permanent collection, with a long-standing focus on emerging and historically underrecognized artists. Massimiliano Gioni now leads that mission at the museum’s most structurally transformed moment in its history.