The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) has picked its new director, Pierre Terjanian. He will step up to the role on 1 July, having served as chief of curatorial affairs and conservation since January 2024. Terjanian succeeds outgoing director Matthew Teitelbaum, who is retiring this summer after ten years leading the MFA—the 83rd-most-visited art museum in the world and ninth-most-visited in the US, according to The Art Newspaper’s most recent attendance-figure survey.
“It is truly an honour to pass the leadership of this great institution to Pierre—an inspiring colleague who believes strongly in the role of art and museums, and the importance of culture and community,” Teitelbaum said in a statement. “His dedication to the curatorial field, and across museum functions, is deeply informed by his unwavering commitment to inquiry, strategy and working with others to address the critical issues facing public institutions today.”
Terjanian—a native of Strasbourg, France—has worked for almost three decades at US museums, including as a curator of arms and armour first at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
During his ten years at the Met, Terjanian organised exhibitions like the ambitious 2019 who The Last Knight: The Art, Armour and Ambition of Maximilian I, with 180 objects borrowed from institutions worldwide. He also co-chaired the Met’s reopening taskforce during the Covid-19 pandemic, raised $100m in funds and works of art for the museum and secured a major gift of 91 objects of European arms and armour from the collector Ronald S. Lauder. (Lauder, an heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune and the founder of New York’s Neue Galerie, is allegedly the person who convinced US President Donald Trump to try to buy Greenland.)
Terjanian won the 2024 Marica Vilcek Prize in Art History and, earlier this year, was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et de Lettres by the French government.
“We live in a time when cultural institutions have a prime opportunity to demonstrate the positive difference they can make in the lives of individuals—and in society,” Terjanian said in a statement. “I am excited to take on this work, and I believe even greater impact will come in the form of partnerships in and beyond Boston."