Julia Gonnella

Julia Gonnella (born 1963 in Düsseldorf) is an Islamic scholar, the former director of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and director of the Lusail Museum since 2024.

Education

Gonnella attended the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Islamic Art and Archaeology in 1986 and a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology in 1987. She received her PhD in Islamic Studies and Social Anthropology in 1994 from the Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen.

While studying, Gonnella worked on German excavations in Raqqa, Syria, from 1984 to 1989 and the Kuwaiti excavations in Bahnasa, Egypt, in 1985. She was part of a German-Syrian excavation of the Citadel of Aleppo from 1996 to 2011 and published the book The Citadel of Aleppo about the findings in 2007. She is co-editor and contributor to Contents and Contexts: Re-Viewing the Diez Albums from 2017.

Career

Gonnella worked as a student intern at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, before becoming an assistant to the head curator at the Museum of Islamic Art at the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin in 1994, where she became head curator herself in 2009. In 2017, Gonnella was appointed director of the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha, replacing Aisha Al Khater.

In February 2024, she was appointed director of the new Lusail Museum, with Shaika Nasser Al-Nassr replacing her as director of the MIA.

Awards

In 2009, Gonnella received a VCU Qatar Fellowship Award for the conference ‘Diverse Are Theis Hues'. She also received the Curatorial Exchange Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013.