Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Appoints Valerie Hillings as Inaugural Director Before December Launc

Valerie Hillings spent nearly a decade helping build Guggenheim Abu Dhabi from the ground up. Now she will be there to open it.

The Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi has named Hillings the institution’s first director, positioning her to oversee strategic direction, opening exhibitions, public programmes and final operational preparations ahead of the December 11 launch. The appointment closes a loop that began in 2009, when Hillings first joined the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation as curator and associate director of curatorial affairs for the Abu Dhabi initiative, working with DCT Abu Dhabi on collection strategy, acquisitions, the pre-opening programme and the development of Frank Gehry’s architectural design.

She left that role in 2018 for the North Carolina Museum of Art, where her track record was concrete. Under her leadership, the institution reimagined its permanent collection galleries, acquired approximately 400 works and doubled annual attendance to 1.2 million visitors. Those numbers matter: they signal an operator who can translate curatorial ambition into audience scale, a skill the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will need from day one.

Hillings holds a doctorate in art history from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and an undergraduate degree from Duke University, and spent five years on the Guggenheim’s curatorial staff in New York before her Abu Dhabi posting.

The institution she returns to lead is the largest in the global Guggenheim system. Gehry’s structure encompasses 80,000 square metres of built-up area, including 11,600 square metres of indoor gallery space and 23,000 square metres of outdoor exhibition areas. By contrast, the scale of the collection matches the physical footprint: assembled since 2009, it spans modern and contemporary art from the 1960s to the present across painting, sculpture, installation, photography, moving image and new media. Publicly announced names include Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, shown alongside artists from Asia, Africa and the Arab world who have received comparatively limited international exposure.

The museum also marks one of the final major additions to Saadiyat Cultural District, joining the Louvre Abu Dhabi, teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, Zayed National Museum and Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi. The district’s completion concentrates significant cultural infrastructure in a single zone, a deliberate clustering that amplifies the draw for international visitors and reinforces Abu Dhabi’s positioning as a cultural destination.

The curatorial framework examines artistic connections and exchanges across cultures from an Abu Dhabi perspective. Gallery programming will explore abstraction, popular culture, land, language and storytelling, creating thematic coherence across the collection. Beyond visual art, the institution plans music, dance, food and public programmes, alongside artist commissions, research initiatives and programming in several languages to serve both local and international audiences.

“I am honoured to return to Abu Dhabi to complete the once-in-a-lifetime journey of founding and opening Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a museum developed in the United Arab Emirates by colleagues from both the region and around the world,” Hillings said in her appointment statement. She added that she looked forward to welcoming audiences to the Gehry-designed building and inviting them to explore artistic interconnections spanning from the 1960s to contemporary times.

Whether an institution of this scale can sustain the attendance levels its ambitions imply, particularly as Saadiyat’s other major venues compete for the same visitors, is the question the December opening will begin to answer.