Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis is the Director and CEO of the Aga Khan Museum. A well-respected cultural sector leader, she has nearly 30 years of experience as a curator and senior advisor for museum and cultural projects. She holds a PhD in Islamic Art from the University of Edinburgh and served as Co-Director at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization as well as Senior Strategic Advisor to the Sharjah Museums Department in the U.A.E. from 2007 to 2017. She began her career in Scotland, where she worked as Principal Curator for South Asia and the Middle East at the National Museums of Scotland from 1999 to 2007 and Curator for Muslim Art and Culture at Glasgow Museums from 1994 to 1999.
Dr. Al-Khamis previously was the first to hold the position of Director of Collections and Public Programs at the Aga Khan Museum, a role that oversees all the Museum’s activities related to collection management, academic research, exhibitions, public programming, and performing arts initiatives. In that role she led a team of subject-matter specialists and program managers to establish a strategically cohesive and sustainable set of audience-focused programs and initiatives devised to further the Museum’s mandate and mission to foster pluralism and intercultural dialogue through the arts locally, nationally, and internationally, also working more broadly within the framework of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) and the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) more generally.