OMPA 2025 Winners Interviews
Watch the full award ceremony celebrating the winners of the 2025 CIMAM Outstanding Museum Practice Award, presented during the 57th CIMAM Annual Conference in Turin.
This page brings together four interviews that extend that moment of recognition, offering reflections on the significance of the Outstanding Museum Practice Award (OMPA) and its role in acknowledging museum practices that respond meaningfully to their social, political, and cultural contexts.
The OMPA, established by CIMAM in 2021, reached its fifth edition in 2025, with the three winning practices presented in Turin during the 57th CIMAM Annual Conference. Shared directly by the awardees with the conference audience was a particularly resonant moment, reinforcing the award’s commitment to visibility, exchange, and professional recognition across diverse institutional realities.
The first interview features Suzanne Cotter, CIMAM Board Member until 2025 and founding Chair of the Outstanding Museum Practice Award. She reflects on the origins of the award and on the importance of recognising practices grounded in care, responsibility, and responsiveness to their local and global contexts.
The page continues with testimonies from the three awardees — María Eugenia Cordero (Museo Barda del Desierto, Argentina), Eva Rowson (Bergen Kjøtt, Norway), and Amer Shomali (The Palestinian Museum, Palestine) — who speak to what this recognition has meant for their teams and communities, and to the conditions under which their practices were developed.
You can read the full press release here, and continue by listening to the interviews featured on this page.
Suzanne Cotter
My name is Suzanne Cotter, and I'm the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. And I've had the honor of chairing for the last five years the Outstanding Museum Practices Award, organized by CIMAM.
The award came to life during COVID at a time when we realized we needed to recognize the fantastic work that is being done by museums of all sizes, in all situations around the world.
This year is the fifth year of the OMPA award, and we received over almost 50 nominations, which is an incredible response and a testament to the importance of the award in giving visibility to the outstanding museum practices happening everywhere on the planet.
María Eugenia Cordero, Director of the Museo Barda del Desierto (mBDD), Northern Patagonia, Argentina
Hello, my name is María Eugenia Cordero, and I am the director of the Museo Barda del Desierto in North Patagonia, Argentina.
It is a museum that focuses on contemporary art, digital technologies, and eco-museums, and we are very happy to have been nominated for the OMPA 2025 award with the project on architectures with blurred boundaries. An architecture that is linked to the body, the territory, and works in the digital world.
Eva Rowson, Director of Bergen Kjøtt, Norway
Hi, my name is Eva Rowson, I'm the director of Bergen Kjøtt Foundation, which is in Bergen on the west coast of Norway.
And we are amazed and excited and so thankful to win this CIMAM Outstanding Practice Award for our project GRIP, which is a training program to train more women, non-binary, and transgender technicians who are working behind the scenes in culture. And in the norm of culture, 93% of technicians are cis men.
But in the last three years, we've trained more than 250 people, and 93% of our trainees are women, non-binary, and transgender.
So we really thank CIMAM for recognizing this initiative, and this award goes out to all trainees and technicians who are working behind the scenes in culture and literally making things like the CIMAM conference happen. Thank you.
Amer Shomali, General Director, The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, Palestine
My name is Amer Shomali. I'm glad to receive the Outstanding Museum Practice Award on behalf of the Palestinian Museum. It means a lot for us today to receive this award because it's reassuring us that our voices were heard and what we did was not a waste of time.
During the genocide, a pressing question was happening all the time. What is the role of a museum during a genocide against your own people? I think this award is reassuring us that you always can participate in stopping a genocide.