Philadelphia Art Museum Fires Director Sasha Suda
78Nov. 6, 2025
The board of the Philadelphia Art Museum (PhAM) on November 4 ousted Sasha Suda from her role as the institution’s director and CEO, which she has held since 2022. According toPhiladelphiamagazine, the dismissal took place via an email in which she was informed that she was being terminated for cause.
The Toronto-born Sudajoined the Philadelphia institutionfrom the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, which she had helmed for three years, and where she had earned a reputation for increasing diversity among staff and among exhibiting artists, and for working to increase engagement between the museum and Indigenous communities. She replaced longtime leader Timothy Rub, who shepherded the $500 million Frank Gehry–designedtransformationof the Philadelphia museum butstepped downafterapologizingfor the institution’s mishandling of harassment complaints made against an assistant director. At that time, the museum, like many across the US, was struggling financially in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, and its staff, which had unionized in the summer of 2020, had begun to strike in order to gain a favorable contract.
Suda worked to lure audiences through programming, this year mounting the exhibition “The Time Is Always Now,” a group show featuring contemporary African artists, and launching the Brind Center for African American art. The Philadelphia Citizen late last summer noted that some board members had chafed at Suda’s drive for inclusion as well as what they saw as a limited exhibition focus and “a slow start to fundraising.”
More immediately, Suda’s firing comes in the wake of a rebranding of the institution—since 1938 until just a few weeks ago known as the Philadelphia Museum of Art—that has proved to be spectacularly unpopular, with detractors referring to the museum as “PhArt” rather than the intended “PhAM,” and some variously complaining that its new logo resembles that of a soccer team, a beer hall, or a hipster coffee shop, and others that it is dystopian and reminiscent of the Cold War era. The rebranding also is said to have caught some board members unawares.
“We had expected to see it after the board gave feedback and expected to see the final version so we could approve it or at least see what they were planning to do,” board member Yoram (Jerry) Wind told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “And it was launched, so we were as surprised as everyone else.”