Museum Series No. 2 Musée Rodin x Philadelphia Museum of Art

Villa Albertine and the Center for Curatorial Leadership are thrilled to host an exceptional transatlantic conversation on the future of museums between Amélie Simier, Director of the Musée Rodin, Paris, and Sasha Suda, Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This discussion will be moderated by Elizabeth W. Easton, Director and Co-Founder of CCL.

The event will be streamed live on Villa Albertine’s Youtube Channel, starting at 6 pm EST.

The Speakers

Sasha Suda, Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Sasha Suda is the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was appointed in June 2022 and began her tenure in September. She brings new generation leadership to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and believes that the visual arts have the power to connect the past to the present and that they can help us to forge a more inspiring, creative, and equitable future.

Born in Toronto to Czech parents, she studied at Princeton University before completing her Master’s degree in art history at Williams College and her PhD at New York University. Her professional career began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she worked in various roles in the Medieval Department between 2003 and 2011.  She returned to her native Toronto to work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, first as an assistant curator, and eventually as Curator of European Art and the Elliott Chair of Prints & Drawings. In these roles, she led major international exhibition projects and spearheaded innovative digital initiatives that presented historical art to audiences in a new light. From 2019 until 2022, she served as director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada where she led the revitalization of its purpose, vision, and mission and first-ever strategic planning process, leading to advances in digital rebranding, exhibition planning, and external stakeholder engagement, with a focus on justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. 

Amélie Simier, Director of the Musée Rodin, Paris

Amélie Simier is the Director of the Musée Rodin, appointed in May 2021. A graduate of the Ecole du Louvre and the Institut National du Patrimoine, she is a specialist in 19th century sculpture, a subject she taught at the Ecole du Louvre for fifteen years. Before directing the Zadkine Museum, then the Bourdelle Museum, she was curator of the 19th and 20th century sculpture collection at the Petit Palais.

With her experience of artist museums, her expert knowledge of sculpture, her international outlook and her commitment to making culture accessible to all, she is well equipped to develop an art and culture education policy and projects that will appeal to a wide audience, while maintaining the museum’s leading position in the field of research into Rodin and preserving the museum’s unique economic model, especially through the edition and sale of original bronzes.

A year before his death, Auguste Rodin bequeathed all his works and possessions to the French state which, in exchange, purchased the Hôtel Biron and committed to turning it into a museum dedicated to the artist. The artist’s bequest was the founding act of the Musée Rodin, which opened to the public in 1919. 

Rodin’s donation of his works and possessions included his intellectual property rights. The molds and models he bequeathed are used to produce original bronze casts, allowing his work to be disseminated worldwide. The Musée Rodin has unique status as the only national museum in France to be fully self-funding. The museum welcomes about 600,000 visitors annually, with 150,000 coming from the US.

Elizabeth W. Easton, Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Curatorial Leadership

Elizabeth Easton is the Director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL), a non-profit organization she co-founded with Agnes Gund in 2007 to train museum curators in the fundamentals of management and leadership. Now in its sixteenth year and with almost 400 alumni around the world, CCL continues to provide curators with the tools necessary to assume and succeed in leadership positions.

She previously served as the first elected president of the Association for Art Museum Curators from 2003-2006, and as chair of the Department of European Paintings and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum from 1999-2007. Easton earned her Ph.D. at Yale University, writing her dissertation on Edouard Vuillard’s interiors of the 1890s.

She is the recipient of the Wilbur Cross Medal—the highest honor accorded to alumni of Yale University’s Graduate School—and in 2008 was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government. She is a trustee of MASS MoCA and is also on the Visiting Committee of the Department of Paintings Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

About the Villa Albertine Museum Series

The Villa Albertine Museum Series, launched by Villa Albertine and the Center for Curatorial Leadership, is a new platform to explore the future of museums on both sides of the Atlantic. It will bring together 24 women leaders from premier cultural institutions in France and the US for monthly conversations in 2023 on how museums must reinvent themselves to meet the challenges of the present.

The Villa Albertine Museum Series Spring Dialogues are made possible thanks to the generous support of Cartier and the Firends of Villa Albertine, notably Béatrice Stern, Sana Sabbagh and Denise Littlefield Sobel.