With the departure of Joshua Basseches at the tail end of 2025, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) went in search of a new director and chief executive, and last week named the Vancouver-born Nicholas R. Bell to those roles. He will take over on 6 July.
Basseches had been at the helm of the downtown Toronto museum for a decade, while Bell most recently served as president and chief executive at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, a post he had held since 2019—his efforts there were hardly unnoticed. That was touched upon by the ROM’s board of trustees in making the announcement.
“Never has the value of major Canadian cultural institutions like ROM been more apparent or relevant,” Andrew MacLeod, the chair of the board, said in a statement. “As a museum leader, Nicholas has successfully nurtured broad stakeholder relationships, developed diverse curatorial programmes, managed significant capital projects and driven attendance results.
Bell had high praise for the Toronto museum in accepting the position. “I am honoured and humbled to join the exceptional team at ROM,” he said in a statement. “We need museums now, more than ever, to help adapt to our changing world and planet. As Canada’s leading field research institute, and a global source for new knowledge, ROM can help answer the question of what will be our common future.”
During his time at Glenbow, Bell was instrumental in the launching of “Glenbow Reimagined”, a significant transformation of the museum’s building with a budget in excess of C$200m ($146m). That project is currently underway and scheduled to be completed in 2027.
Rendering of the Royal Ontario Museum's OpenROM project Courtesy the Royal Ontario Museum
Bell also spearheaded the museum’s current strategic plan, with an emphasis on financial sustainability, increased inclusion and accessibility. Indigenous community engagement as well as reconciliation were top priorities during his time at Glenbow, which was Canada’s first major museum to offer free general admission for all. With the cost of admission to cultural institutions always on the rise, that surely appeals to Calgarians.
Prior to Glenbow, Bell served as the senior vice-president of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. He is the author or editor of 11 books on art, culture and museums, among them 2015’s Wonder, with Lawrence Weschler contributing.
He will have his hands full at the ROM, the most visited museum in Canada—and, with more than 1.1 million visitors in 2024 according to The Art Newspaper’s most recent survey of attendance figures, the 74th-most-visited in the world. According to the museum’s announcement, his job will include oversight of the institution’s operations, finances and capital projects, including the C$130m ($96m) OpenROM project. That project, already underway and originally scheduled for completion next year, involves renovating and bringing more natural light into certain parts of the museum while adding 6,000 sq. ft of gallery space.
It was Basseches who got the ball rolling on OpenROM, which was helped by a C$50m ($37m) donation by the Hennick Family Foundation, the largest cash gift in the museum’s history.
