Johanna Burton to Lead Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art
128July 26, 2025
TheInstitute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania(ICA Philadelphia) has namedJohanna Burtonas its next director. Burton, who since 2021 has served asexecutive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, will take up her new role on November 1. She fills the position left vacant by Zoë Ryan, who becamedirector of the Hammer Museum in Los Angelesat the beginning of the year.
Burton arrives to the noncollecting institution with a reputation as a stalwart champion of artists known for her commitment to institution-building and her engagement with education in a variety of formats. While at LA MoCA, she worked to increase fundraising and development efforts, adding more than twelve new trustees to the museum’s board. Too, she expanded live performance programming and reinaugurated the museum’s MoCA Focus series, which gives artists their debut solo shows at the museum. Burton was previously executive director of the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, serving in that capacityfrom 2018through 2021. She earlier spent six years as director and curator of education and public engagement at New York’s New Museum.
“Johanna Burton is among the most prominent and insightful leaders in contemporary art,” said the University of Pennsylvania provost John L. Jackson Jr. in a statement. “She has wide-ranging experience working with artists across media, mentoring curators, collaborating with students and faculty, and energetically drawing new audiences to art institutions on both coasts. We are very gratified to bring her to Penn at a time when the arts are more vital than ever.”
“ICA Philadelphia has always been a beacon for what’s next—prioritizing the emergent, the risk-taking, and the rigorously experimental—and I’ve long admired its role as both community anchor and hub for global discourse,” said Burton in a statement. “In many ways, this appointment returns me to the kind of institution that first shaped my curatorial and academic sensibilities, a focused but deeply influential center for artistic innovation within a pedagogical setting. To step into this position at ICA at a moment when the possibilities for institutional and cultural impact are so pressing is a profound honor. I am eager to build on ICA’s legacy of forging connections across campus, the city of Philadelphia, and the international arts community.”