Royal Ontario Museum CEO Josh Basseches to depart at end of 2025

The Royal Ontario Museum’s chief executive officer Josh Basseches will leave his post later this year after nearly a decade.

When the CEO took over the downtown Toronto institution in 2016, it had struggled to recoup pledged donations, was mired in debt, and faced backlash over the controversial architecture of its north-facing “Crystal” façade, designed by Daniel Libeskind. Once at the ROM, Basseches spent much of his tenure trying to reorient the museum’s spaces and programming to welcome more of the public.

Basseches and his fundraising team have marshalled enough funding pledges in recent years to make sweeping changes to Canada’s most-visited museum. It reopened its 1933 entrance, worked to re-emphasize the 18 million artworks, natural specimens and cultural objects in its collection, and is now in the midst of a $130-million transformation billed as OpenROM.

The project is intended to reimagine much of the ROM’s main floor, redesign its Bloor Street West “Crystal” entrance and add 6,000 square feet of new gallery space.

And just last month, the ROM announced a $30-million gift from the Temerty Foundation to endow a new fund for community engagement – one that Basseches hopes will remove barriers to access and broaden the institution’s visitor base.

Basseches announced his departure from the museum Thursday morning. He will remain in the role until the end of 2025. The museum did not announce a successor but said in a press release that its board of trustees would immediately start searching for a replacement.

“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 said in the release. He was not available for interviews.

Postmedia CEO Andrew MacLeod, who was recently appointed as the ROM board of trustees’ chair, said in a statement that the search for a new ROM chief would “be informed and inspired by the impressive trajectory” Basseches set for the museum.

The ROM has spent the past five years reckoning with an unpredictable economic environment: revenue-shattering pandemic lockdowns followed by surging inflation and interest rates that have devastated the cultural sector.

The museum has reported deficits in the last four fiscal years with data available, but its long-term debt fell 33 per cent, to $19.8-million, between the fiscal year before Basseches’s 2016 arrival and March 2024.

While Ontario has provided stabilization grants since COVID-19 restrictions first struck in 2020, its baseline operating grant for the museum has hovered around $27.3-million for more than a decade. According to ROM’s annual reports, the organization’s expenses grew 32.2 per cent between Basseches’s arrival and March 2024.

Before leading the ROM, Basseches was deputy director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and executive director of the Harvard Museum of Natural History.