Academy Taps Smithsonian Director to Run Movie Museum

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has tapped museum veteran Kerry Brougher as director of its new Academy Museum, sources told Variety.

Brougher, the current interim director and chief curator of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, will assume his new post in the summer.

Groundbreaking on the new museum is expected to take place later this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus.

Brougher has a long resume. He’s has been at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., since 2000 and spent three years as director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England. Between 1982 through 1997, he served in several slots at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

He also graduated from UCLA with a master’s degree in the history of film and television.

LucasFilm chief Kathleen Kennedy headed the selection committee for the AMPAS Museum post.

AMPAS announced in 2012 that it had selected Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali as the architects for the $300 million museum, which is aimed celebrating the history of the Academy. The museum will be located in the former May Co. building known today as LACMA West.

A past winner of the Pritzker Prize, Piano was the architect of a renovation to LACMA’s campus last decade that featured the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.