Valerie Hillings knows Guggenheim Abu Dhabi from the inside. Between 2009 and 2018, she served as Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, working directly on the building’s development, collection strategy, acquisitions and pre-opening planning. Now, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Department of Culture and Tourism in Abu Dhabi have named her the museum’s inaugural director, as the long-gestating institution moves toward its opening on Saadiyat Island.
The appointment carries weight precisely because of that history. Hillings returns not as an outsider brought in to manage a finished product, but as someone who helped shape the project in its formative years. Most recently, she spent six years as Director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she led a comprehensive reinstallation of the permanent collection, oversaw the acquisition of approximately 400 works and grew annual attendance to 1.2 million visitors. That record of operational leadership, layered over her earlier Guggenheim experience, made her the foundation’s choice to carry the project across the finish line.
In her own words, she called the role “a once-in-a-lifetime journey.” She described her intention to welcome audiences to Frank Gehry’s building while exploring “points of interconnection and unique stories through the lens of art from the 1960s to our time.”
What changes now: Hillings will oversee curatorial direction, inaugural exhibitions and the establishment of public and research programmes. The museum is no longer a distant ambition. It has a director, a scheduled opening date of 11 December 2026, and a building that is, by any measure, extraordinary. Gehry’s design, inspired by forms associated with the Gulf region, occupies a waterfront site and contains 30 galleries across 11,600 square metres of interior exhibition space. A further 23,000 square metres of outdoor exhibition areas spread across terraces and conical structures surrounding the building.
The collection spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, moving image and new media, focused on modern and contemporary art from the 1960s onwards. Rather than a strictly chronological or geographic organization, the curatorial approach is expected to emphasize artistic exchanges and networks across regions, a framework that suits a museum positioned at a crossroads between East and West.
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi sits within the broader Saadiyat Cultural District, which already includes Louvre Abu Dhabi and will eventually incorporate the Zayed National Museum, the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi and teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi. Together, these institutions are reshaping Abu Dhabi’s identity as an international centre for modern and contemporary art.
With less than eighteen months until the scheduled opening, the question now is what Hillings will choose to say first, and to whom, when Gehry’s doors finally open.