A museum that was first announced in 2006 — delayed for two decades, with costs ballooning to roughly US$1 billion — finally has someone in charge. Valerie Hillings was appointed the inaugural director and CEO of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on 4 August 2026, with the museum scheduled to open on 11 December 2026 (The National; Gulf News).

She is not arriving cold. Between 2009 and 2018, Hillings served as curator and associate director of curatorial affairs on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project, working out of New York under the title Curator and Manager, Curatorial Affairs, Abu Dhabi Project (Artnet; Guggenheim). She had already spent five years on the Guggenheim's staff in New York before that. In 2014, she curated "Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and that same autumn the museum's "Intersections" exhibition featured the inaugural presentation of 16 works from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi collection (Artnet; Guggenheim).

After leaving the Abu Dhabi project, Hillings spent five years as director of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, starting in 2018. There, she added roughly 400 works to the collection — including African art and the museum's first Pablo Picasso painting — and annual attendance grew to 1.2 million visitors (Artnet). She holds a doctorate in art history and archaeology from New York University, with a focus on modern and contemporary art.

In a statement, Hillings said she was honored to return to Abu Dhabi to complete the founding and opening of the museum (Artnet; Guggenheim). The Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi had previously listed her as editor of "The Creative Act Educator Resource Guide," a publication tied to the museum's programming (DCT Abu Dhabi).

The building she will oversee is among the largest cultural projects in the region. Designed by architect Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi features more than 370,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor exhibition space (Artnet). It sits within the Saadiyat Cultural District, a planned cultural hub on Saadiyat Island that already includes the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and will also host the forthcoming Zayed National Museum and teamLab Phenomena (Artnet).

What makes the appointment notable is the timeline: Hillings now has just over four months to steer a museum that has been in development for twenty years through its final stretch to a December opening. Her earlier years on the project mean she knows its collection and its curatorial framework — the question now is the execution.