Vancouver Art Gallery Names Eva Respini and Sirish Rao Co-CEOs

The Vancouver Art Gallery has appointed Eva Respini and Sirish Rao as co-CEOs, effective immediately, the museum announced. Respini will also serve as chief curator, overseeing the institution's artistic vision, exhibition strategy, collection development, and the ongoing project to erect a new building. Rao adds the title of executive director, leading operations, earned revenue, and finance, along with community outreach, institutional partnerships, and interdisciplinary programming.

The two have led the museum jointly on an interim basis for a year and a half, since CEO and executive director Anthony Kiendl left the corner office he had occupied since 2020. Founded in 1931, the museum was to relocate to a Herzog & de Meuron building downtown during his tenure. That move was canceled after the budget rose from CAD $400 million ($288.8 million) to CAD $600 million ($435 million), as reported in the Vancouver Sun. The museum then invited 14 Canadian architectural firms to apply to design the new building. Respini and Rao ultimately chose Formline Architecture + Urbanism and KPMB Architects to design a new home for the institution.

Under their stewardship, the museum has recorded its highest attendance and membership levels since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I've worked at several North American museums, and I feel like the Vancouver Art Gallery is on the cusp of a new chapter," Respini said in a video conversation. "As a curator it's not often that one can be part of a new chapter, thinking about a future and almost a 100-year past of great curators and directors who have come before us."

Rao added, "We are big enough to participate in a global dialogue but nimble enough to put forward a model for an institution and for a city. It's exactly the right size to play in."

The VAG is not the first museum to promote two internal staffers to leadership positions. Just this summer, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum elevated deputy director Jillian Jones and chief curator Cathleen Chaffee to be co-equal leaders as executive director and artistic director, respectively.

"Leading a museum is not an easy thing," Respini acknowledged. The collaborative model, she said, brings "two heads and two different lived experiences, which was very appealing to us and to the board. We're not two people doing one job. We're two people doing three jobs." She added, "This is a time when museums need to learn a different way of being."

"While we have the same larger purpose of vision, we are accountable to each other," said Rao. "It's a huge increase in accountability over what any single leader would have. This works for us. It's not necessarily for everyone. Because we bring such distinct things to the table, we overlap in purpose and vision."

What's more, he said, "We can literally be in two places at once."

Respini joined the museum as deputy director and director of curatorial programs in August 2023, after serving as chief curator since 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. There, she was curator and co-commissioner of Simone Leigh's presentation for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; she also curated a Leigh retrospective that toured American museums between 2023 and 2025.

At the VAG, Respini has helped grow the permanent collection rapidly. In 2025, the museum secured a gift of 122 works from the holdings of area collectors Brigitte and Henning Freybe, estimated to be worth some $10 million and including examples by Carl Andre, Mary Corse, Tacita Dean, Brian Jungen, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jeff Wall. It also announced in 2025 the joint acquisition, with Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, of US photographer Nan Goldin's major work Stendhal Syndrome (2024). This past March, the museum announced a major gift of more than 800 works from American photographer Stephen Shore's series "Uncommon Places."

Rao joined the institution in January 2023 as director of public engagement and learning. He has given serious thought to what museums can contribute to society, including through the award-winning Art of Wellbeing Lab and the launch of a partnership with the British Columbia Parks Foundation's PaRx prescription program, which allows healthcare professionals to prescribe free museum admission to their patients. Among other acknowledgments of his work, he was included in Vancouver Magazine's Power 50. Prior to joining VAG, he had been director of India's Tara Books, founding artistic director of the Indian Summer Society, and founding partner of publishing and arts consultancy Idefix.

The institution has also faced challenges during their leadership. In June 2025, VAG laid off some 30 unionized employees, saying the cuts were necessary to "ensure long-term sustainability."

"We are really proud to be in a stable financial position," said Respini. "We are running a balanced budget and intend to continue to do so—not without a lot of difficult choices. It's not numbers, it's people's lives."

Both are excited to lead the museum along a path to a new home. "The country is going through a reckoning in its identity," said Rao. One question, he said, "is very much on the minds of Canadians: what does a cultural identity look like? We have the opportunity to answer that in our program and our architecture."

Not only will they build from the ground up in the architectural sense, said Respini, "but also we are actually building a museum from the ground up: what is a museum of the 21st century? Museums need to be a place of gathering, of joy, inspiration, and learning, not just a temple for art."