Arūnas Gelūnas is an artist, philosopher, curator, and cultural diplomat. He has served as Director General of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art since 2019. His professional career encompasses museum leadership, academic research, artistic practice, cultural policy, and international diplomacy.
Gelūnas studied graphic art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and Japanese painting and calligraphy at Tokyo University of the Arts, where he was subsequently affiliated as a researcher. In 2001, he received his doctorate in philosophy from Vytautas Magnus University. His scholarly engagement with Japanese art resulted, among other publications, in the study “Making Art in the Japanese Way: Nihonga as a Process and Symbolic Action”, published in Making Japanese Heritage (Routledge, 2009).
Between 1997 and 2010, Gelūnas taught printmaking, ink painting, art theory and the philosophy of art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden. He also lectured on the history of Japanese art at Vilnius University. From 2004 to 2010, he served as Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. He was Minister of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania from 2010 to 2012, Lithuania’s Permanent Representative and Ambassador to UNESCO from 2012 to 2016, and a member of the Lithuanian Parliament from 2016 to 2019. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Aalto University in Finland.
Under Gelūnas’s leadership, the Lithuanian National Museum of Art has significantly expanded its collections, strengthened its research and publishing activities, and raised its international profile. Important bodies of work and documentary holdings associated with the philosopher Alphonso Lingis and the artists Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus and Pranas Gailius have entered the Museum’s collections. The archive of Jonas Mekas—filmmaker, poet and a leading figure in international avant-garde cinema—was transferred from New York to Vilnius, where the Museum established a dedicated research centre to preserve, study and disseminate his legacy.
Gelūnas has initiated and developed major international collaborations with institutions including Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris, and Tate, as well as with representatives of Marc Chagall’s family. These partnerships have led to significant exhibitions, loans, scholarly exchanges and publications. The Museum’s collaboration with Tate has been particularly important in advancing the international presentation and scholarly study of the work of the Lithuanian-American artist Aleksandra Kasuba.
His curatorial projects include Protest Art: The Rebels of the Soviet Era at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art (2020) and Beauties, Ghosts, and Samurai: The Japanese Pop Culture Tradition from Edo Ukiyo-e to Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Manga, Anime, and Sūpā Furatto at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2024). Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he initiated and curated a series of exhibitions presenting selections from more than 1,200 artworks evacuated by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art from museums in Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv. These included Magnificent Refugees of War: Masterpieces of Sixteenth-to Eighteenth-Century Western European Painting from the Collection of the Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery.
In 2023, Gelūnas conceived the Room of One Masterpiece, a unique exhibition format designed to facilitate slow, individual encounters with works of art and their carefully developed historical and artistic contexts. The inaugural presentation placed paintings by Frans Hals within a specially designed contemplative multimedia space.
In 2024, Gelūnas served as Commissioner of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. He has published scholarly articles, translations, and essays, and has edited or compiled books on philosophy, cultural studies, art theory, art education, and art history. His publications include Art Studies: Between Method and Fancy (Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2006), Museum of Friends: The Collection of Vladimir Tarasov at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (2020), Protest Art: The Rebels of the Soviet Era (2022), and Beauties, Ghosts, and Samurai: The Japanese Pop Culture Tradition from Edo Ukiyo-e to Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Manga, Anime, and Sūpā Furatto (2024). He also invited Alphonso Lingis to compile a collection of essays on art and aesthetics, published by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art in 2025 as Alphonso Lingis: Art Beginning Again.
His research interests encompass Lithuanian and Western art from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, classical and contemporary Japanese art, artistic expression under totalitarian regimes, cultural diplomacy, and contemporary museology.
For his work strengthening cultural ties with Japan, Gelūnas received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, from the Japanese Government in 2020. In 2023, he received the Officer’s Cross of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. In 2025, by decree of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he was awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit, III degree. He was subsequently appointed a Knight of France’s National Order of the Legion of Honour in recognition of his service to cultural cooperation between Lithuania and France.
