The KHM-Museumsverband is immensely pleased to announce that Dr. Jonathan Fine will take up the post of Director at the Weltmuseum Wien as of July 1, 2021.

The native New Yorker Jonathan Fine is an art and cultural historian whose work has focussed on art from Africa. He received his PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University (New Jersey, USA) in 2020.

He is currently the Head of Collections at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, where he worked as a curator for the collections from West Africa, Cameroon, Gabon, and Namibia starting in 2014. He has curated exhibitions on Cameroon and on the Kingdom of Benin. The exhibition ‘Beyond Compare‘, which he curated together with Julien Chapuis and Paola Ivanov, juxtaposed African artworks from the Ethnologisches Museum with a selection of European sculptures from the Bode-Museum collections in Berlin. A further focus of his work has been provenance research, especially for objects from Cameroon and the Kingdom of Benin.

He studied history and English literature at the Universities of Chicago and Cambridge, and completed his law degree at Yale University. He subsequently worked as a lawyer in the United States for many years. His work covered human rights, international trade disputes and constitutional rights, before he turned to the study of art.

Director General Sabine Haag is looking forward to Jonathan Fine taking up the post of Director at
the Weltmuseum Wien as of July 1, 2021.

‘Jonathan Fine will bring his outstanding expertise and forward-looking approach to the museum
on the Heldenplatz, and will enrich us all. I am looking forward very much to seeing his intellectual
energy, new interdisciplinary projects within the KHM-Museumsverband and with outside
institutions, as well as new ways of engaging the public,‘ says Sabine Haag.

Jonathan Fine said about his appointment that ’I am deeply honoured to head the Weltmuseum
Wien. The expertise and commitment of my future colleagues have brought the museum, with its
reopening in 2017 and its subsequent exhibitions, to the forefront of the international museum
landscape. The incomparable collections of the KHM-Museumsverband and the cultural dynamic
of the city of Vienna create enormous potential for building on the strengths of the Weltmuseum.‘