Daniel Weiss had a part-time job as a stock clerk in the gift shop at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., while in school at George Washington University studying psychology and art history. When his boss was fired for substantial revenue losses, Weiss told the people in charge at the Kennedy Center: “I think I can fix this.” He was offered a six-month tryout the week he graduated in 1979, and over the next four years continued to run the retail business and supervise a staff of 175.
It wouldn’t be the last time he stepped in to fix things.
“Along the way, I realized I was interested in pursuing graduate training in art history, but I also had an interest in how organizations function,” Weiss said this summer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he started as director and CEO last December, a month after the board of trustees fired his predecessor, Sasha Suda. While at the Kennedy Center and throughout “the rest of my career,” he explained, “it became clear to me that if one cares about culture and the arts and higher education, one has an obligation to care also about how these institutions are run.”
Weiss, now 69, is widely viewed as a smart and thoughtful straight shooter, skilled at solving organizational problems. With an MBA from Yale and a PhD in Western medieval and Byzantine art from Johns Hopkins, he had a long career in academia, working in tandem as president and professor at Lafayette and then Haverford colleges, before being hired as president and chief operating officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015. In his eight years at the Met, he helped steer the institution out of a $40 million financial deficit and through a change in directors and internal culture. Now at the PMA, which is also facing a major budget deficit after years of high staff turnover and low morale, Weiss is being looked to as a steady hand to right the ship.
“Dan brings a combination of qualities that’s uncommon,” said PMA board chair Ellen Caplan. “He obviously understands art and scholarship, but also how to lead large, complex organizations. He has a proven track record and a compelling vision for the role that museums play in society right now.”
When Weiss stepped down from the Met in 2023, his plan was to teach, write books, spend time on his boat, and, he said, “just live the life of somebody who wakes up not in charge of anything.” He took a faculty position at Johns Hopkins, where he had begun his teaching career in 1993, and was asked by several institutions, including the PMA—on Suda’s introduction—to advise on governance practices. “I’m something of a voice in that area,” said Weiss, who articulated his views on the importance of shared governance at mission-driven institutions in his 2022 book Why the Museum Matters.
Working with the PMA’s board on a governance review over the next two years, Weiss “got to watch, from a fairly close point of view, the dissolution of Sasha’s relationship with the institution and the board,” he said. After Suda’s termination in November 2025, according to the public record, she filed a lawsuit contending that she was fired “without a valid basis,” and pushed to have a jury trial; the board responded that “Suda misappropriated funds from the museum and lied to cover up her theft.” A court ruled early this year that the matter would be settled privately in arbitration, as per a clause in Suda’s contract.
The board’s decision to terminate Suda was made “completely independent of anyone that we were going to bring in to follow up,” Caplan said. “One had nothing to do with the other.”
Weiss said that at first, when the board approached him to step in, he was hesitant to take the helm. “My initial reaction was: ‘I’m not your guy,’” he recalled. “On the other hand, I thought, I know how to do this. I understand the issues. Maybe we can get this place back on track, where it’s doing what it should in the world.”
According to a veteran of the New York museum world, speaking on background, Weiss’s replacement of Suda could have at least the appearance of opportunism. “Dan, who is a consultant to the board, slip[ped] into that job really quickly. He has a way of being like a board whisperer,” said the person, adding, “I’m not saying that there weren’t reasons for both Dan to accept it and the board to do what they were doing. Things are never that black and white.”
Asked if the PMA board had considered conducting a search for a new director, vice chair Osagie Imasogie said the trustees had unanimously agreed to appoint Weiss to the position. “If you look at the market for top-notch leaders in museums of the caliber of the PMA, it’s just a handful of people who would fit that profile,” he said. “There was no point in going through a performative process when we already had the best person we could think about.”
If the board had brought Weiss in on only an interim basis, that would have diminished “the full authority to get on with the work that needs to be done,” Imasogie added. “It was also important that we ensure stability be brought back to the institution after the challenges we have had.”
In his work with the governance committee, Weiss had presented to the full board. “There was an immediate comfort level, both because we knew Dan,” said Jennifer Rice, chair of the governance committee at the time, and “he also came with such a stellar reputation for the work he did at the Met.”
DURING AN INTERVIEW OVER LUNCH in his office, Weiss came across as direct and efficient, at once businesslike, candid, and personable. Before addressing the first question he was posed, he paused to point out that, like his interviewer, he, too, wore a coin on a chain, pulling from underneath his shirt and tie a third-century Hellenistic coin with the image of Alexander the Great, given to him by his family. “I’ve worn it around my neck for 25 years,” he said. “It feels like a connection to the ancient world and the continuity of human existence.”
Born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised on New York’s Long Island, Weiss described himself as “a completely lackluster student” early on. Wandering into an art history survey class at GW, he fell under the spell of a charismatic young professor who was a medievalist. “He changed my life,” said Weiss, who is friends with him to this day. “That was where it began for me.” With his dual graduate training in art history and business, Weiss began teaching at Johns Hopkins as well as writing books; by the time he was tenured, he’d also become involved in administrative work. “I knew how to run a meeting and had experience in things that most faculty don’t,” he said. He rose to the position of dean in 2001, before moving in 2005 to lead Lafayette College for eight years, then Haverford College for two. He described being very surprised when the Met approached him.
“I’d never worked in a museum before, and they were asking me if I wanted to run it,” Weiss said. “They were looking for someone who could bring management and fiscal knowledge and experience into a role that was also completely sympathetic and sensitive to the mission. It opened up a world for me that I didn’t really plan on.”
In his first weeks on the job, he dug into the museum’s financial statements and discovered that what had been presented to him as a modest $4 million deficit on a budget of more than $300 million was, in fact, a $40 million deficit.
“The museum was drawing down reserves in ways that weren’t really kosher to meet operating deficits,” he said. “We had been overspending and, as it were, undermanaging the institution, and it had resulted in various patterns of accommodation to these problems that were not fully transparent to the board.”
Under Tom Campbell, a former tapestries curator promoted in 2009 to director and CEO after the retirement of Philippe de Montebello, who had led the Met for more than 30 years, the museum had been investing heavily in its digital operations as well as its modern and contemporary satellite, Met Breuer (which operated in the former Whitney building from 2016 to 2020).
“To Tom Campbell’s credit, I made him aware right away of a very substantial deficit, and he was perfectly willing … to do whatever it took to figure it out,” Weiss said.
Campbell would ultimately resign under pressure in 2017. The Met’s board voted unanimously that Weiss would assume the title of president and CEO, and that a new director would report to him. Max Hollein was appointed to that role in 2018, and by 2020, working together, the two leaders had balanced the budget. When Weiss stepped down in 2023, Hollein assumed the additional title of CEO.
“Dan is a leader who doesn’t shy away from complex issues,” said Candace Beinecke, cochair of the Met’s board. “His tenure at the Met was defined by his tremendous commitment to the museum’s mission. Working in partnership with the museum’s director, he steadily and effectively helped lead the Met through crucial moments. He brings deep analytical skills, expertise, and a strong sense of purpose to his work.”
Central to Weiss’s management at the Met was his reinforcement of the principles of shared governance. “It starts with the relationship between the CEO and the board,” he said, “but all the constituencies that have a vested interest in the well-being of the institution—the curators, the professional staff, the mayor’s office, the unions—also need to have a voice.”
Weiss enlisted the staff as partners in helping to fix the deficit, creating a task force of some 15 representatives to advise on budgetary decisions. They were part of tough conversations about how to cut the program, cut salaries, make layoffs. Weiss’s proposed changes to the museum’s longtime admissions policy of “pay what you wish”—after a decline of 67 percent in the average fee people paid during the previous decade—was controversial internally. The task force gave presentations to every department to involve the staff of 2,000 in the logic of Weiss’s proposition.
“We went through a long, difficult process to find the right approach based on principles, economic interest, and what’s best for the institution,” Weiss said. The new policy, instituted in 2018, maintained “pay what you wish” for New York State residents, who already support the Met through their taxes, but charged $25 (since raised to $30) for out-of-town adults. “In the end, it generated the revenue we needed, and it had no negative effect on visitation,” he said. “It was one step of 40 that we had to do to bring the budget into balance.”
A longtime Met employee, speaking on background, described Weiss as popular overall with the staff. “He was accessible, somebody you could talk to,” the employee said. “He’s a very rational, reasonable, and reasoned man.”
Weiss also instituted a review process at the Met, requiring the board to evaluate his own performance annually and perform a “360”—including feedback from employees—every other year. He later required the same for all department heads at the Met. “You must be accountable to the people you lead,” he said, noting that nobody would ever have given de Montebello a review. “I think it was a great disservice to Tom Campbell, who was a brand-new leader with no experience, not to have a performance evaluation of any kind.”
What Met trustee and former board chair Daniel Brodsky appreciated most in working with Weiss was “his willingness to listen,” he said. “He made time for staff at every level of the museum, and he genuinely cared about creating an environment where they could do their best work. During a period that included leadership transitions and the pandemic, that steady approach served the museum well.”
The PMA—RANKING IN THE TOP FIVE largest encyclopedic art museums in the US by both physical and collection size—now stands to gain from Weiss’s brand of leadership.
In late July, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the museum had a deficit of $10 million on an operating budget of $76.5 million and that its leadership expected the deficit could grow to as much as $15.9 million in the next year. Weiss said his goals for his first year are to fully assess the museum’s finances, rebuild the senior leadership team, and move forward on an action plan with open lines of communication across the board and staff.
In 2020, during the tenure of Timothy Rub, who led the PMA from 2009 to 2022, more than 400 staff members signed a petition calling for accountability changes in the wake of complaints about the behavior of former managers. Later that year, the staff voted to unionize. Museum workers went out on strike in 2022, on Suda’s first day on the job as new director (she chose to cross the picket line).
“Over the last several years, staff levels have decreased very dramatically,” Weiss said, from some 500 employees five years ago to about 385 now, through a combination of attrition, firings, and layoffs to reduce operating costs. “At the same time, the programmatic ambition during Sasha’s years here was very high, so there was more to do and fewer staff to do it. That led to a really strong sense of disappointment and frustration.”
Weiss has recently recruited Mitchell Wein, from the Brookings Institution, as executive vice president, chief financial officer, and chief operating officer; Lavita McMath Turner, from the Met, as chief people officer; and Neil Batiancila, from the Philadelphia Zoo, as chief advancement officer. He’s also promoted longtime curator Jennifer Thompson to deputy director of collections and exhibitions, to work alongside Jessica Smith, chief curator.
“I didn’t want a hiring freeze when I arrived, because the institution couldn’t survive that way—you have to have people in the right jobs,” Weiss said, acknowledging that he had added to the expense base. “We’ll balance the budget—it’s just a matter of exactly how. I know what the levers are.”
Caplan said that Weiss’s consistent internal communication on his action plan—addressing nine areas, including facilities, visitor experience, technology, and security—has already helped with morale. “He’s continuing to provide updates on progress being made or challenges he’s facing, and that transparency is appreciated by both the staff and the trustees,” she said.
Weiss appointed an internal task force to reevaluate a controversial rebranding campaign rolled out last fall under Suda, which included the institution’s name change to the Philadelphia Art Museum (mocked by critics as “the PhArt Museum”). A collaborative decision was made early this year to reinstate the original name but keep the new logo, featuring a griffin—a decorative architectural element repeated across the museum’s 1928 Beaux-Arts building.
The plan for a second phase of an ambitious expansion—originally approved by the board in 2004, during the tenure of Rub’s predecessor, Anne d’Harnoncourt, then designed by the late Frank Gehry—is now on hold. (The first phase of the plan was completed under Rub in 2021, for $233 million.) “We have a series of deferred building maintenance issues that have to be addressed before we return to the question of the Gehry project,” Weiss said.
He believes the museum’s current annual attendance of about 675,000 is “way too low,” he said, given the size and quality of the institution’s world-renowned collection of more than 240,000 objects and its stature in the city. But he has yet to set a specific target number for visitation, or dig into the question of admissions cost. “We feel very strongly that admissions pricing is a necessary evil, but whatever we do has to work for Philadelphia, so people come,” he said. The museum’s endowment—now almost $600 million—could always be better, Weiss said, but “it’s totally respectable.”
Weiss, who has committed to staying through 2028, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he expects to have the budget balanced in three years. He and the board will then decide whether he will continue on for longer, he said, stating firmly, “I’m not going to stay 10 years.” He and his wife, a corporate healthcare lawyer whom he met at GW, live near the museum in a high-rise building. In Easton, Maryland, where he serves on the board of the Academy Art Museum, among several other institutions, they have a second home, with an extensive book collection that reflects Weiss’s diverse interests. His boat remains docked in the marina there.
While the skills of museum leadership may be transferable, Weiss recognizes that he is “not operating on the same patient,” he said. “The PMA is not the Met. They have different issues, different cultures, different communities. You need to listen very carefully and take what you know and apply it respectfully to this place in this ecosystem. I don’t have it all figured out.”