VIENNA.- The KHM-Museumsverband announced the appointment of Jennifer Sliwka as director of the Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum effective November 2025. Sliwka’s appointment followed a multi-level international search.

Jennifer Sliwka was born in the USA and grew up between Canada and the United Kingdom. She was educated at the University of Toronto, the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where she completed her doctoral thesis on the sixteenth-century Sienese artist Domenico Beccafumi.

Since 2023 Sliwka has been Keeper of the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology and the Garlick Professorial Fellow at Balliol College both at the University of Oxford. Before joining the Ashmolean she worked at the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum in London. She was also a Lecturer, for over ten years, at King’s College London.

A highly-respected art historian and museum curator, she is a specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting. She is also known for her transhistorical and interdisciplinary approaches to scholarly and museum projects, working with a number of contemporary artists including Michael Landy, Olafur Eliasson, Danh Võ and Louise Giovanelli.

Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the University of Cambridge and Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence.

Among her most important exhibitions are Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500 (The National Gallery, 2011), Visions of Paradise: Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece (The National Gallery, 2015/16), Monochrome: Painting in Black and White (The National Gallery; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, 2017/18) and Reframed: The Woman at the Window (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2022). She is co-curator of the upcoming exhibition Aphrodite-Venus: The Making of a Goddess at the Ashmolean Museum. Director General Jonathan Fine: “I am thrilled that Jennifer Sliwka will lead the Team of the Picture Gallery. Her interdisciplinary approach and her innovative exhibitions will reposition and strengthen the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s presentation of its world-renowned collection of paintings.”

Jennifer Sliwka: “It is a great honour to head the Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of the greatest museums in the world. I am looking forward to working with the Gallery’s superb team of curators and conservators to devise new exhibitions, displays and research projects to inspire and attract the widest possible audience. Building on the achievements of my esteemed predecessors, I look forward to collectively reimagining ways of celebrating this world class collection and broadening the way we experience and think about art today.”