The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston named Pierre Terjanian its next director and chief executive after a seven-month international search, museum officials said on Thursday.
Terjanian, the chief of curatorial affairs and conservation at the museum, will succeed Matthew Teitelbaum, who became the director in 2015. Terjanian will begin his new position in July.
In an interview on Thursday, Terjanian, 56, said that he felt like everything he had been doing in his career was leading to this moment. “The predominant feeling is the excitement,” he said. “This is a great institution, and it has a big part to play in Boston, in New England and beyond.”
Asked what he thought about the overall climate around museums under the Trump administration — which has closed some institutions like the National Environmental Museum and is trying to force changes at others like the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art — Terjanian said it was “volatile.”
“It’s an environment that forces us to continue to consider how we operate,” he said. “We obviously want to be in compliance with all the legislation, and we’re monitoring closely all the changes.”
He added that “uncertainty” is not helpful to institutions, and that the museum was currently “not planning any significant changes.”
The museum would remain nimble, he said, and he noted that over the last two years, it had received some funding from the city of Boston but has received less than 1 percent of its budget from the government.
The museum was not planning to avoid certain programming because of the Trump administration’s prohibitions against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, he added. “We want to be compliant, but at this time we’re proceeding with our programs, all of them,” he said.
Terjanian, a native of Strasbourg, France, started at the museum in 2024 as a leadership team member in charge of all conservation of the museum’s collection of more than 500,000 objects.
He helped develop the museum’s current exhibition “Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits,” a collection of 23 works that explore the artist’s relationship with a neighboring family when he stayed in the South of France in the 1880s.
Before joining the museum, Terjanian worked as a curator in charge of the department of arms and armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; he was also a curator and acting head of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts before 1700 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Emi M. Winterer, the president of the board of trustees at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said in a statement that Terjanian’s name came up repeatedly during the search process.
“He quickly earned the trust and respect of his colleagues,” Winterer said.
