The Vancouver Art Gallery has confirmed Eva Respini and Sirish Rao as its permanent Co-Chief Executive Officers, converting an interim arrangement that has run since March 2025 into the institution's settled leadership structure.
Respini will serve as Co-CEO and Chief Curator. Rao will serve as Co-CEO and Executive Director. The two titles are deliberately asymmetric: the Gallery has paired a curatorial lead and an operational lead at equal authority rather than appointing a single director with a deputy beneath them.
Both were named Interim Co-CEOs in March 2025, following the departure of chief executive Anthony Kiendl. The Gallery ran the dual model as a temporary measure for roughly eighteen months before its board confirmed it as the permanent arrangement.
Respini joined the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2023 as Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs. She arrived from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where she served as chief curator and built a reputation as one of North America's more prominent contemporary curators. She retains the Chief Curator title alongside the chief executive remit, which keeps the Gallery's exhibition programme under the direct control of one of its two principals rather than delegating it a level down.
Rao joined a few months earlier, starting that same year as Director of Public Engagement and Learning. He co-founded the Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver and came to the Gallery from programming and audience development rather than from collections or curatorial work. The pairing gives the institution a curator and a public programmer at the top, which is a different centre of gravity from the curator and fundraiser pairing more common at museums of comparable size.
Co-chief executive structures remain uncommon among major public art museums, where the single director model is close to universal and where shared authority is usually treated as a transitional state rather than a destination. The Vancouver Art Gallery's decision to formalise one, rather than run a conventional external search once the interim period had run its course, is a governance choice as much as a personnel one. It commits the institution to a model whose durability depends heavily on the working relationship between the two individuals holding it.
The Gallery is the largest public art museum in Western Canada and holds a permanent collection of more than twelve thousand works, with a particular concentration in British Columbian and Indigenous art. It operates from the former provincial courthouse building in downtown Vancouver.
The Gallery set out the confirmations in a leadership announcement issued from Vancouver on September 28.
