Gaëtane Verna
Gaëtane Verna is a Canadian museum curator who was the Wexner Center for the Arts Executive Director in Columbus, Ohio.
Biography
Gaëtane Verna was born in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Haitian parents. At the age of 2, the family moved to Canada.Verna holds a master's degree and a Master's of Advanced Studies from the Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University as well as an international heritage administration and conservation diploma from the École Nationale du Patrimoine de Paris. Gaëtane Verna has taught at the Department of Art History at Bishop's University in Sherbrooke and at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
From 1998 to 2006, she was the curator at the Foreman Gallery of Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec. She was the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Musée d'art de Joliette from 2006 to 2012. In 2012, she became Director and Artistic Director of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Ontario, and was the first woman to hold the position. Artists with whom she has collaborated since 1998 include Terry Adkins, John Akomfrah, Vasco Araújo, Fiona Banner, Ydessa Hendeles, Alfredo Jaar, Luis Jacob, Kimsooja, Yam Lau, Oswaldo Maciá, Javier Tellez, Denyse Thomasos, Bill Viola, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Miriam Cahn, Mario Pfeifer and Franz Erhard Walther.
In 2022, Verna was named the Executive Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Following a letter sent to the University from Wexner Center employees expressing a vote of no confidence in her leadership, Verna resigned in October of 2025. The letter was sent only a year after The Columbus Dispatch published a report in which sources detailed “a culture of dysfunction perpetuated by the museum’s executive director” that at that point had led to the departures of more than two dozen employees.