Brett Littman Named Fifth Director of Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) has named Brett Littman as its fifth-ever director and CEO, ending a six-month search to fill the role left vacant when Kathryn Kanjo departed in January for the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. Littman takes up the post in October.
The appointment brings Littman back to the city where he studied. He earned a BA in Philosophy from UC San Diego in 1995, according to Artnet News, which first reported the hire on 17 August 2026.
His career has spanned several well-known New York institutions. He served as deputy director of MoMA PS1 — the Queens affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art — from 2003 to 2007, before spending eleven years leading The Drawing Center, a SoHo museum devoted to works on paper. When the Noguchi Museum — a Long Island City institution dedicated to the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi — announced him as its new director in February 2018, he was still serving as executive director of The Drawing Center and stepped down from that role in May of the same year.
At the Noguchi Museum, Littman doubled the institution's operating budget. His tenure there ended abruptly in June 2023, with the museum offering no explanation for his departure, as Artnet News noted in its reporting of the MCASD hire.
After leaving the Noguchi Museum, Littman founded a consultancy serving art institutions, according to Artnet News. That venture occupied him until the MCASD search committee came calling.
Kanjo, his predecessor, had led MCASD since 2013 before leaving in January to head the Langson Orange County Museum of Art at UC Irvine. Her exit opened the top job at a museum that has operated under only four directors since its founding in 1941, making each succession a rare event in the institution's history.
What makes this stand out is the gap in the résumé. A director who doubled a museum's budget would normally be a straightforward hire, but Littman's unexplained 2023 exit from the Noguchi Museum — and the fifteen months of consultancy work that followed — sit alongside that achievement in the public record. MCASD has not addressed the departure in its announcement.
The museum's search, conducted over six months, evidently weighed both the growth record and the unanswered questions. Littman arrives in October with a philosophy degree from the same city he will now help lead culturally, and with a mandate shaped by whatever the search committee concluded about the full arc of his career.
