Maria Schnyder Named New Director of De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art
1April 20, 2026
Swiss art historian Maria Schnyder has been named the new director of theDe Pont Museumof Contemporary Art, a visual art staple in Tilburg, North Brabant, the Netherlands,Artdependencereports. Schnyder will succeed current director Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, who plans to retire in October.
Schnyder is a longtime employee of the De Pont who joined the institution in 2013 and went on to serve as deputy director, a post she’s held for the last four years. Schnyder has also worked as an independent researcher for Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, in Ghent, Belgium. She has a Research Master’s in Art History from the University of Groningen and was the owner of the Bureau of Contemporary Art from 2012 to 2016. Related The Met Hires Star Photography Curator for the Museum’s New Wing Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu Departs to Lead Guggenheim Museum
“De Pont is an ‘artist first’ museum, steadfast and uncompromising in its dedication to artists and their vision – a key motivator for me,” Schnyder said in a statement. “To my mind, we have the crucial task of enabling visitors to discover how freeing and enriching it can be to fully immerse oneself in an artist’s world.”
“De Pont is a museum which – first and foremost – thinks and works from the artist’s point of view,” Taco Dibbits, chairman of the board of De Pont Museum, said in statement. “Maria Schnyder is the ideal person to do this and, therefore, to lead De Pont into the future. She knows the museum inside out and, over the years, has grown into a curator with a keen eye for artistic practice and an emphatic kinship for the fantastic space of this former woollen mill. In an era in which societal and audience-driven agendas are increasingly setting the tone in the museum sector, the commitment to artists remains more relevant and urgent than ever.”
The De Pont opened in 1992 and has a collection that includes work—largely photographs and work on paper—by Luc Tuymans, Mark Wallinger, Anish Kapoor, Marlene Dumas and others.