Sophie Makariou was appointed President of the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts in 2013.
During her first two terms, Sophie Makariou worked to redesign the institution’s project by relaunching a dynamic policy of enriching collections, developing the museum’s international policy and partnerships and rethinking the museum’s programming.
His project for his third term at the head of this international reference institution will focus on strengthening his role in understanding by the greatest number of civilizations in Asia, from their oldest history to their development today. As part of the development of the scientific and cultural project and the strengthening of open programming, it will develop the museum’s identity as a museum of Asian civilizations and Asian arts.
The National Museum of Asian Arts-Guimet houses unique collections in all fields of the arts of the Far East, and especially of Central Asia. Today it is the largest Asian art museum outside Asia.
General Curator of Heritage, Sophie Makariou is a graduate of the Louvre School of Art History and the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales en histoire (M2), she was also trained at the Institut National des Arts et Civilisations Orientales (classical Arabic).
At the age of 52, she began her career as a heritage curator in 1994 at the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum, where she became director of the Islam section in 2001 and, in 2009, of the new Department of Islamic Arts. In particular, she ensured the scientific coordination of the collections, the design and programming of new spaces dedicated to these collections opened in the Visconti Court in September 2012.
Specialists in cultural interactions between civilizations, she has published numerous studies on the topic of exchanges.