Lucas Museum in Los Angeles Lays Off 14 Percent of Full-Time Staff
163May 21, 2025
TheLucas Museum of Narrative Arthas laid off fifteen full-time employees, or 14 percent of its full-time workforce. Many of those who lost their jobs worked in education or public programming at the Los Angeles institution, which additionally eliminated the roles of seven part-time on-call staffers. TheLos Angeles Timesreported that the layoffs sparked a chaotic scene, with employees called into meetings with the human resources department the morning of May 15 only to be sent home jobless, with their belongings sent after them via courier.
“It is a tremendously difficult decision to reorganize roles and to eliminate staff, but the restructure will allow the museum’s teams to work more efficiently to bring the museum to life for the public,” said the museum in a statement, noting that the terminations were “due to a necessary shift of the institution’s focus to ensure we open on time next year.”
Founded by renowned Star Wars director George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, president and co-CEO of Ariel Investments, the Lucas Museum has been in the works for over a decade. Following a 2018 groundbreaking, the museum has seen its timeline pushed ahead repeatedly, first by the Covid-19 crisis, which caused construction delays from 2022 to 2023, then by supply-chain issues, which pushed the deadline to 2025. Earlier this year, it was announced that the institution would open in 2026. This past spring, Sandra Dumont-Jackson, who since 2020 had been its inaugural director and CEO, departed, with Lucas taking up curatorial direction duties and Jim Gianopulos, the onetime chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, taking over as interim CEO.
The Times noted that Lucas seemed less interested in educational programming, where many of the cuts were made, than Jackson-Dumont had been. The museum affirmed that despite the layoffs it would “continue hiring new roles in strategic operational areas.”