Following a decision by Lina Mendoni, Minister of Culture and Sports, Sirago Tsiara, historian of art and curator, is appointed as Director of the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum.

Syrago Tsiara is an art historian, curator and until now Director of ΜΟΜus – Museum of Contemporary Art and the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. She has fifteen years of experience in managing public museums and twenty years of experience in managing collections of Greek and international art. She has curated more than fifty exhibitions in Greece and abroad, she has organized conferences, she writes scientific studies and gives lectures, mainly about the relationship between art and politics, memory, identity, curatorial practices and the interconnection of modern art with archaeological sites and the public sphere.

Συραγώ Τσιάρα / Syrago Tsiara

From 2007 to 2020 she directed the Centre of Modern Art. From 2017 to this day, she has been directing the Thessaloniki Biennale of Modern Art. In 2009 she co-curated the Second Biennale of Modern Art in Thessaloniki – “Praxis. Art in Times of Uncertainty”. She curated the Greek participation in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2017, together with Maria Tsantsanoglou, she curated the exhibition of 28 Greek artists in the National Museum of Arts in Beijing, in the framework of the Seventh Biennale of Contemporary Art in Beijing, where Greece was the honoured country. During the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, she was the national commissioner.

She was born in Larisa in 1968. She studied History and Archaeology in the School of Philosophy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, continued with graduate studies in Social History of Art at Leeds University, UK. She wrote her doctoral dissertation at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, about the role of public sculpture in the shaping of national memory, and she acquired her PhD in 2000. She worked in the research, study, documentation and promotion through exhibitions of the Costakis Collection in Greece and abroad, while also teaching at the University of Thessaly.

Since the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts in Thessaloniki (MOMus) was founded in 2018, she directed the Museum of Contemporary Art – Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections. In 2019, she worked with Dimitris Antonakakis in managing the National Museum of Modern Art for its opening to the public. During the same year, she finalized the design and curation of the permanent collection of contemporary Greek art in the Municipal Gallery of Larisa – G.I. Katsigras Museum.