> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.artwalkway.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Souraya Noujaim Returns as Louvre Abu Dhabi Enters Its Second Decade - URL: https://www.artwalkway.com/souraya-noujaim-returns-as-louvre-abu-dhabi-enters-its-second-decade/ - Published: 2026-10-09T12:51:12.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-09T12:51:12.000Z - Description: Souraya Noujaim’s appointment is more than a leadership change. As Louvre Abu Dhabi approaches its tenth anniversary, her return places one of the museum’s founding curatorial figures inside a changing institution shaped by collection growth, public engagement and scholarship. - Author: ART News - Tags: Latest Art News, Museums & Institutions, Museum Leadership, Souraya Noujaim, Louvre Abu Dhabi Souraya Noujaim is not arriving at Louvre Abu Dhabi as a new figure. She is returning to an institution whose formation she already helped shape. Her appointment as director places one of the museum’s early curatorial figures back inside Louvre Abu Dhabi at a moment when the institution is approaching its tenth anniversary and the terms around it have begun to change. The Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi announced Noujaim’s appointment on 7 October. She succeeds Manuel Rabaté, who led Louvre Abu Dhabi from its opening years before leaving earlier this year to direct the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. ![Portrait of Souraya Noujaim, newly appointed director of Louvre Abu Dhabi, wearing a white shirt against a neutral background.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/67/ce6755e5-3cd4-455d-bb45-9007241988ef/content/images/2026/10/Dr.-Souraya-Noujaim-as-Director-of-Louvre-Abu-Dhabi.png) Souraya Noujaim has been appointed director of Louvre Abu Dhabi ahead of the museum’s tenth anniversary in 2027, returning to an institution whose founding curatorial and collections vision she helped shape. **Photo courtesy of Louvre Abu Dhabi.* Noujaim brings an unusually direct relationship to the institution she will now lead. A specialist in Islamic art history and archaeology, she most recently served as Director of the Department of Islamic Arts at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and Chief of the French Grand Department of Islamic Art Heritage, overseeing a collection of 18,000 Islamic artworks. Before that, she was closely involved in the Louvre Abu Dhabi project for more than a decade. From February 2018 to April 2023, she served as the museum’s first Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management Director, overseeing curatorial, scientific and collections activity, helping build the collection through acquisitions and shaping the narrative that defines the museum today. Those details matter because this is not only a succession. It is also a return into a changed institution. Louvre Abu Dhabi’s first decade was defined by formation: the Franco-Emirati agreement, Jean Nouvel’s architecture, the Louvre name, the question of what a universal museum could mean in the Arab world, and the loans that made the opening display possible. That founding structure remains. Louvre Abu Dhabi is still shaped by exchange, by the agreement between Abu Dhabi and France, and by rotating loans from French partner institutions, regional museums and international collections. But the weight inside that structure has shifted. When Louvre Abu Dhabi opened, almost 30 percent of the works on display came from its own collection, with around 70 percent on loan from French museums and regional lenders. Today, while the overall number of works on view has remained broadly consistent, nearly two-thirds of the works presented across the museum’s four chronological worlds belong to Louvre Abu Dhabi itself. That does not make the French partnership secondary. It changes what the partnership now sits around. This is where Noujaim’s return becomes institutionally significant. Not because it settles what Louvre Abu Dhabi is becoming, but because it places someone closely tied to the museum’s founding curatorial work at the point where collection, scholarship, public engagement and institutional memory now meet. Art Here 2026 gives one sign of that movement. Organised with Richard Mille, the sixth edition received more than 300 proposals from GCC nationals and residents and Indian nationals. Its theme, Confluences, extends the platform across histories of movement, migration, trade and cultural exchange between India and the Gulf. The Children’s Museum offers another sign. Its current exhibition, A Board Game Adventure, approaches board games as a shared human form of learning, imagination and social connection across cultures and generations. It is a family programme, but also an interpretation strategy: a way of translating the museum’s universal narrative into participation, play and public encounter. Read together, these programmes move the appointment away from biography and toward infrastructure. The collection changes what the museum can speak from. Art Here changes who produces within its frame. The Children’s Museum changes how that narrative is translated for public use. Research, conservation and fellowships change the museum’s role from display alone toward knowledge production. None of this completes the question of Louvre Abu Dhabi. It makes the question more specific. A museum created through intergovernmental agreement and global visibility now has to keep working through more ordinary but more durable forms: acquisitions, interpretation, scholarship, conservation, education, audience development and the repeated testing of what its universal narrative can mean in practice. The risk for any museum built through a large symbolic act is that the founding gesture remains louder than the institution that follows it. Louvre Abu Dhabi has avoided some of that risk by growing the material and programmatic base beneath the gesture. But the second decade will test how far that base can carry its own authority. Noujaim’s appointment does not answer that test in advance. It does, however, return one of the museum’s early curatorial builders to the place where the test will now take shape. Louvre Abu Dhabi’s first decade established presence. Its second will show what kind of voice that presence can support. © ART Walkway. All Rights Reserved.