The board of trustees of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) announced on Monday (28 September) that it has appointed Eva Respini and Sirish Rao as the institution’s co-chief executives, confirming a dual leadership model that has been in place as a temporary measure since March 2025, when the former chief executive Anthony Kiendl stepped down (he subsequently took the helm of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver).
The end of Kiendl’s five-year term came a few months after the gallery pulled the plug on an ambitious but costly building project initiated by his predecessor, Kathleen Bartels, on which the gallery had already spent C$60m ($42m). A few months later, a huge deficit resulted in the laying off of around 30 employees.
The decision reflects the board’s confidence in Respini (who will continue to serve as chief curator) and Rao (who will also serve as executive director), who it says have stabilised the gallery’s finances, deepened its connections to artists and the wider community, and formulated a long-term vision for the VAG’s future.
“Eva and Sirish have demonstrated exceptional leadership distinguished by shared purpose,” Jon Stovell, the chair of the gallery’s board of trustees, said in a statement. “They each bring different but deeply complementary perspectives to the gallery, and together, they are expanding our sense of what the Vancouver Art Gallery can be and the role it can play in the 21st century.”
Respini came to the VAG in August 2023, after several years as the deputy director and chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, where she curated an exhibition by Firelei Baez that she brought to the VAG in 2024. Previously, she was a curator in the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for more than a decade.
In her first three years at the VAG, Respini has strengthened its collection through major acquisitions and gifts, including works by Nan Goldin and Stephen Shore, and 122 works from the Brigitte and Henning Freybe collection, the most significant donation of international contemporary art in the gallery’s history.
Rao, who came to the VAG in January 2023, has a varied background including as the director of Tara Books, a publishing house based in Chennai, India, as an author and public intellectual, and as a co-founder of the Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver. For an institution that some feared had lost its way, Rao’s certificate as a Himalayan mountain guide is also notable.
Since joining the VAG, Rao introduced the BC Parks Foundation’s PaRx prescription programme, an initiative that enables healthcare professionals to prescribe free gallery admission to their patients. He has also advanced the gallery’s Centre for Global Asias as a national platform for exhibitions, research and public programming.