Josh Basseches, who steered the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) for nearly a decade, will step down as its director and CEO at the end of this year.
His departure was announced Thursday morning in a press release issued by the museum, which said its board of trustees will immediately begin a “comprehensive search” for Basseches’s replacement.
“It has been an honour to lead this institution through what has been a truly transformative period in its history,” Basseches said in a statement. “After a decade as director and CEO, and with the Museum well positioned for its next chapter, this feels like the right moment for me to head towards new challenges and seize new opportunities.”
Basseches, who joined the organization in March 2016, led the ROM through the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and also through its three recent renovations.
Basseches announced last year a $130 million redevelopment plan that will completely transform the museum’s ground floor in its Crystal wing and add 6,000 square feet of new gallery space. The ongoing project, named OpenROM, is the museum’s most significant facelift since the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal on Bloor Street opened in 2007.
In the first years of Basseches’s tenure, the ROM broke attendance records and cemented itself as one of the top 10 most-visited museums in North America. But since the pandemic, the ROM has struggled to draw visitors back, despite introducing new outreach and free programming initiatives.
In the museum’s most recent fiscal update from 2023-24, attendance was at 96 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. That year, the ROM also posted a deficit of more than $3.6 million.
Before joining the ROM, Basseches served as the deputy director of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Mass. He has also worked at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and was executive director of the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
