Mariët Westermann

Mariët Westermann is the Director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, overseeing the Foundation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and providing collaborative leadership working with the director of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the director for the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Westermann led New York University Abu Dhabi, a degree-granting liberal arts and research campus of NYU, as Vice Chancellor, Chief Executive, and Professor of Arts and Humanities since 2019. She was the institution’s Provost at its founding, from 2007 to 2010. At NYU Abu Dhabi, she oversaw all academic, administrative, financial, and operational affairs. An art historian by training, she is widely regarded as an innovative and empathetic leader who inspires excellence, manages complexity, and brings a profound understanding of how art, culture, and the humanities play a critical role in our globally interconnected world.

Westermann has authored numerous books, articles, and exhibition essays on Dutch art and artists, museums, and the state and future of higher education. She was the lead curator and catalog author of Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, shown at the Denver Art Museum and The Newark Museum (2001-2002), and served as a curatorial consultant and essayist for the National Gallery of Art’s presentation of Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller (1996) in partnership with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. On behalf of the Mellon Foundation, Westermann commissioned and published (with Roger Schonfeld and Liam Sweeney) two critical research studies on staff diversity in the museum sector.