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The Museum of Modern Art announces the appointment of Evangelos Kotsioris as the director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment. Kotsioris will also serve as a curator in the Museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, where he will lead initiatives focused on ecology and sustainability in collaboration with the Museum’s curatorial departments. As director, he will develop a robust and diverse roster of exhibitions, along with digital and onsite programs that address the interconnectedness of architecture and ecology. He will also develop an acquisitions strategy for the collection, focusing on projects that advance sustainable practices in architecture.
“The Ambasz Institute was founded to advocate for architecture as an ecological and cultural practice, and to provoke new ways of imagining the built environment at every scale. At a time when the climate crisis can induce paralysis or despair, it underscores architecture’s capacity to shape alternative futures,” said Evangelos Kotsioris. “In its next chapter, my vision is for the Institute to evolve into a generator of original, robust, and inspiring research, advanced through publications, public programs, exhibitions, and acquisitions—a home for lively dialogue among architects, designers, scholars, artists, and the public on how we can live together on a fragile planet.”
“I am thrilled to appoint Evangelos Kotsioris as the new director of the Ambasz Institute” said Martino Stierli, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. “In his previous capacities in the department, he has consistently proven his intellectual rigor, leadership skills, and investment in matters of architecture and ecology. Evangelos is ideally equipped to successfully steer the Ambasz Institute into its next phase.”
As assistant curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, from 2021 to 2025, Kotsioris’s curatorial work has focused on making visible architecture’s ecological and societal dimensions across diverse contexts: The exhibition Reuse, Renew, Recycle (2021–22) examined socially and environmentally sustainable architectural practices in China; Architecture Now: New York, New Publics (2023) highlighted public housing, urban parks, and social infrastructure as tools of environmental justice; and Down to Earth (2024–ongoing) explores how architecture might recalibrate our relationship to the ground.
Kotsioris holds a professional degree in architecture and engineering degree from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, an MArch II from Harvard University, and a PhD in history and theory from Princeton University. He has taught extensively, and is the author of Kisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower (The Museum of Modern Art, 2025) and co-editor of Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022).
Press contact: Jack Spielsinger, jack_spielsinger@moma.org.
