Guggenheim Abu Dhabi names its first director

Four months before its opening on 11 December 2026, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has appointed Valerie Hillings as its inaugural director. Hillings has run the North Carolina Museum of Art since 2018; before that she spent nearly a decade on the Abu Dhabi project itself, working as curator and associate director of curatorial affairs from 2009 to 2018. The appointment was reported by The Art Newspaper on 5 August 2026.

The museum was first announced in 2006, and its Saadiyat Island building has since become shorthand for both the region's cultural investment and a repeatedly postponed timetable. Its collection concentrates on art made since the 1960s rather than an encyclopaedic survey. Hillings arrives with numbers behind her: 1.17 million visitors across two North Carolina campuses in fiscal year 2025. The harder question is curatorial. December will show how much of a twenty-year promise has actually been kept, and whether the collection builds a canon of its own.