Sandra Jackson-Dumont will leave her role as the director and chief executive of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles at the end of March after just over five years in the role. The museum, co-founded by the Star Wars film-maker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, the co-chief executive of the asset management firm Ariel Investments, has a budget of around $1bn and has been under construction since March 2018. It is currently expected to open in 2026.
According to an announcement by the museum, Jackson-Dumont’s departure was precipitated by the adoption of a “new organisational design to split the current role into two positions”. Chief executive duties will be taken up on an interim basis by Jim Gianopulos, the former chairman and chief executive of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. After a permanent chief executive is brought on, Gianopulos will remain as a special advisor to Lucas and Hobson. Meanwhile, Lucas himself will be “responsible for content direction” going forward, per the announcement.
Prior to joining the Lucas Museum, Jackson-Dumont had been the chairman of education and public programmes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for five years. A native of San Francisco, she had previously held curatorial, education and public programming roles at the Seattle Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Lucas Museum’s development has had nearly as many twists and turns as the Star Wars franchise itself. Originally proposed for a site next to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—near Lucas’s Bay Area home base at Skywalker Ranch—the project was then moved to a site in Hobson’s hometown of Chicago near lakefront landmarks including the Field Museum and Soldier Field stadium. But following a campaign by local preservationists, Hobson and Lucas ultimately abandoned their Chicago plan and eventually settled on a parcel of land on the west side of Los Angeles’s Exposition Park.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art under construction in Los Angeles's Exposition Park © 2025 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles
The museum’s ambitious, futuristic 300,000 sq. ft building, designed by Ma Yansong of the firm Mad Architects, is now in advanced stages of construction. The institution’s collection has also grown by leaps and bounds, with Hobson and Lucas acquiring contemporary, modern and Old Master works with a narrative bent, from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Judgment of Solomon (1526) and a Triumph of Galatea (around 1650) attributed to Artemesia Gentileschi and Onofrio Palumbo, to Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr Eloesser (1940), Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), Robert Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) and Ernie Barnes’s The Drum Major (2003).
In 2020, Hobson and Lucas also acquired the Separate Cinema Archive, a trove of more than 37,000 objects chronicling African American cinema from 1904 to the present.