Michael Govan

Michael Govan is the current director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Prior to becoming the director of LACMA in 2006, Govan worked as the director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York City.

Govan was born in 1963 in North Adams, Massachusetts, and was raised in the Washington D.C. area, attending Sidwell Friends School. From an early age, Govan dreamed of becoming an artist.

He majored in Art History and Fine Arts at Williams College, where he met Thomas Krens, who was then director of the Williams College Museum of Art. Govan became closely involved with the museum, serving as Acting Curator as an undergraduate. After receiving his B.A. from Williams in 1985, Govan began an MFA in Fine Arts at UCSD.

As a twenty-five year old graduate student, Govan was recruited by his former mentor at Williams, Thomas Krens, who in 1988 had been appointed director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Govan served as deputy director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum under Krens from 1988 to 1994, a time of great expansion that culminated in the construction and opening of the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, Spain. Govan supervised the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection galleries after its extensive renovation.

From 1994 to 2006, Govan was president and director of Dia Art Foundation in New York City. There, he spearheaded the conversion of a Nabisco box factory into the 300,000 square foot Dia:Beacon in New York’s Hudson Valley, which houses Dia’s collection of art from the 1960s to the present. Built in a former Nabisco box factory, the critically acclaimed museum has been credited with catalyzing a cultural and economic revival within the formerly factory-based city of Beacon. Dia’s collection nearly doubled in size during Govan’s tenure, but he also came under criticism for "needlessly and permanently" closing Dia's West 22nd Street building. During his time at Dia, Govan also worked closely with artists James Turrell and Michael Heizer, becoming an ardent supporter of Roden Crater and City, the artists' respective site-specific land art projects under construction in the American southwest. Govan successfully lobbied Washington to have the 704,000 acres in central Nevada surrounding City declared a national monument in 2015.

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