Art Fund has revealed the five exceptional museums in contention for Museum of the Year 2025, the world’s most significant museum prize. Each finalist represents a bold vision for cultural engagement, from immersive living history to cutting-edge contemporary art, demonstrating the transformative power of museums across the UK.
Beamish, The Living Museum of the North in County Durham, leads the shortlist. Visitors step into meticulously recreated worlds spanning the 1820s to the 1950s, uncovering the rich social history of North East England. In Cardiff, a vibrant arts hub, gallery spaces, artist studios, theatres, and community gardens merge, fostering creativity at every turn. Compton Verney in Warwickshire marries world-class art collections with the grandeur of an 18th-century mansion set within 120 acres of Capability Brown-designed parkland. Belfast’s Golden Thread Gallery, freshly relocated to the city centre in 2024, champions contemporary art alongside Northern Ireland’s first visual art archive. Perth Museum, newly opened after a £27 million redevelopment, weaves 10,000 years of history around the legendary Stone of Destiny.
The winner, to be announced on 26 June at a ceremony in Liverpool—the first held outside London—will receive £120,000, with £15,000 awarded to each finalist. The prize, totalling £180,000, recognises institutions that have delivered outstanding programming between autumn 2023 and winter 2024, with a focus on community engagement, artistic innovation, and the dedication of staff and volunteers.
Chaired by Art Fund Director Jenny Waldman, this year’s judging panel includes artist Rana Begum, Tate’s Dr David Dibosa, Amgueddfa Cymru’s Jane Richardson, and comedian Phil Wang. The judges will visit each shortlisted venue, assessing its unique contributions to cultural life.
Waldman praised the finalists as “inspiring examples of museums at their best—deeply connected to their communities, alive with energy, and offering distinctive experiences that reflect creativity and care.” She added, “The Art Fund is proud to champion their ambition and encourage audiences to discover the vital role museums play in our lives.”
Funded by Art Fund’s National Art Pass members, the prize underscores the charity’s commitment to supporting UK museums. Art Pass holders enjoy exclusive benefits at the shortlisted venues and hundreds of other cultural institutions across the nation.
THE SHORTLISTED MUSEUMS
Beamish, The Living Museum of the North (County Durham)
Beamish, The Living Museum of the North, is a renowned open-air museum that brings the history of North East England’s Georgian, Edwardian, 1940s, and 1950s to life through immersive exhibits. Visitors engage with costumed staff and volunteers and experience regional stories of everyday life. As it approaches its 55th anniversary in 2025, Beamish continues its long-standing commitment to preserving local heritage.
In the past year, the museum completed its Remaking Beamish project, which involved recreating a 1950s Town developed with community input from people with firsthand knowledge of the original spaces. This project involved over 32,000 community members, 14,338 schoolchildren, and 35,000 volunteer hours to create 31 new exhibits within the museum. The year also saw the opening of the Aged Miners’ Homes (AMH), which tells the story of pioneering welfare provision for retired miners in County Durham. Continuing its celebration of regional industrial heritage, Beamish will host the Festival of Transport from May 24 to June 1, 2025, as part of the National Railway 200 celebrations.
The museum has been commended for its exceptional visitor experience, receiving both the Travellers’ Choice Award and the national Visitor Welcome Award at the 2024 Museums + Heritage Awards. The museum provides innovative educational programming for 40,000 schoolchildren each year, using its collections and spaces to inspire learning across disciplines, from local history to science and engineering. In 2024, the museum welcomed over 838,630 visitors and remains the region’s most-visited attraction and museum.
Chapter (Cardiff)
Chapter is an international centre for contemporary arts in Cardiff, Wales. The venue includes a gallery, artists’ studios, theatres, cinemas, rehearsal and hire spaces, a café bar, and a community garden. Their approach centres community through programmes that prioritise social and cultural equity, connection and shared purpose.
From 2023 to 2024, Chapter commissioned fourteen exhibitions by diverse international artists, including Adham Faramawy, Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye and Abi Palmer, exploring themes from the climate crisis to materiality. Chapter also recently introduced an artist residency programme offering free studio space, mentoring and resources, and launched Deaf Gathering Cymru, Wales’ largest festival of D/deaf-led creative activity for all the family. This year, Chapter demonstrates its commitment to socially engaged practice with its upcoming screenings of Steve McQueen: Grenfell, from May 10 to June 15, 2025.
Responding to the cost-of-living crisis, Chapter expanded their ‘Pay What You Can’ pricing and free community tickets, attracting over 4,300 first-time visitors. The centre welcomed 525,000 visitors between 2023 and 2024, all while serving as a thriving creative hub for 80 artists and innovative companies. Chapter continues to co-create exceptional programmes that enrich Cardiff’s cultural landscape, including Printed, a celebrated festival of printmaking, and Neo Soul Jams, a dynamic monthly platform showcasing emerging Global Majority music talent.
Compton Verney (Warwickshire)
Established in 2004, Compton Verney is a vibrant cultural destination committed to making art accessible to all by connecting people with art, nature, and creativity. Home to six world-class art collections, a sculpture park, and a café, it offers enriching experiences for a wide range of audiences. Set within 120 acres of Capability Brown parkland, the galleries are housed in a Grade I-listed Robert Adam mansion, providing a distinctive backdrop to its diverse programme.
In 2024, Compton Verney unveiled its ambitious Sculpture in the Park exhibition featuring works by artists such as Sarah Lucas, Permindar Kaur, Larry Achiampong and Helen Chadwick, complemented by a new site-specific commission by Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti. Committed to diverse voices, the gallery regularly invites artists and communities to reimagine its 18th-century facade, sparking fresh conversations about representation in cultural spaces. All of this is on top of a wide-ranging exhibition programme exploring everything from the legacies of Capability Brown to Louise Bourgeois, and the largest ever exhibition of work by Chila Kumari Singh Burman. Compton Verney continues its dedication to innovative programming this year, with a large-scale multimedia exhibition of work by Emma Talbot (5 July – 5 October 2025), featuring the artist’s recent work that investigates the experience of life from birth to death.
Visitor numbers reached over 117,000 in 2023-24, marking a 30% increase from pre-pandemic figures. Community engagement thrives at Compton Verney, with over 6,000 schoolchildren visiting and participating in early years creativity projects. Recent initiatives include an exhibition with student-led interpretation and a monthly dementia café. This commitment to inclusion has also earned Compton Verney the Skills West Midlands Inclusion Award for breaking down barriers to cultural careers for young people with disabilities.
Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast)
Golden Thread Gallery is Belfast’s leading contemporary art gallery, using the visual arts to explore the past, present, and future, while offering contextual experiences of Contemporary art. After closing in August 2023, the gallery reopened in August 2024 in a new venue at 23-29 Queen Street in Belfast city centre.
Golden Thread Gallery’s transformation includes two large gallery spaces, a projection room, a Community Participation & Engagement Hub, and the Northern Ireland Visual Art Research Library and Archive, the first of its kind in Northern Ireland. During its physical closure, Golden Thread partnered with the Naughton Gallery at Queen’s University to maintain outreach programming. Since its reopening, the gallery has presented exhibitions by artists from Northern Ireland and beyond, including Charlotte Bosanquet, Robyn Hilgen, Graham Fagen, Susan Hiller, Claire Morgan, and more. This summer, Golden Thread Gallery will present ‘Beyond the Gaze – Shared Perspectives’ (21 June – 27 August 2025), showcasing the video and photographic works of Sophie Calle in Northern Ireland for the first time.
Between its opening in August 2024 to March 2025, Golden Thread Gallery welcomed over 23,000 visitors to its new space. Their community impact was recognised with an Arts & Business NI Award for Creative Community Engagement through their partnership with Translink NI, which produced an iconic public sculpture by Kevin Killen incorporating local narratives and community stories at the redeveloped York Street station.
Perth Museum (Perth)
The Perth Museum, housed in the Category B-listed former Perth City Hall, is a civic museum that tells 10,000 years of Scottish, UK, and world history through a local lens. The museum serves as the new home of the Stone of Destiny, one of the UK and Scotland’s most significant treasures, which has returned to Perthshire after more than 700 years.
The Perth Museum opened in March 2024, following a £27 million development and award-winning renovation by Dutch architects Mecanoo, which transformed a historically significant building that had been closed since 2005. At the heart of this museum, the Stone of Destiny experience uses state-of-the-art immersive technology to contextualise this contested object within the story of the medieval Scottish boy king, Alexander III, alongside a temporary exhibition programme. A new exhibition, exploring the history and legacy of Macbeth (25 April – 31 August 2025), will continue to delight and inspire visitors with treasures, including Shakespeare’s First Folio and a medieval sword from the era of the real King Macbeth. The museum’s Partner Schools Project also engages 10 primary schools from local areas, building lasting partnerships that empower teachers, pupils and communities to connect with their heritage.
Since its opening, the Perth Museum has attracted over 250,000 visitors, including 100,000 in under 100 days. The museum has been recognised with several awards, including a 5-Star Visitor Attraction rating from VisitScotland, the Museums Association’s Museums Change Lives Championing Social Justice Award 2024, and the Scottish Design Awards’ Best Brand Identity (Civic) 2024. The museum has also boosted the local economy, with Perth and Kinross Council reporting an average 68% increase in city centre footfall since it opened.
THE 2025 JUDGING PANEL
David Dibosa is currently Director of Research and Interpretation at Tate and is co-author of Post-Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (Routledge, 2013). His other published works include: ‘Gavin Jantjes’s Korabra Series (1986): Reworking Museum Interpretation’ in Art History (2021); and ‘Exhibiting Embarrassment’ (2021), an essay published by the Journal of Visual Culture and the Harun Farocki Institut.
David trained as a curator after receiving his first degree from Girton College, Cambridge. He was awarded his Phd in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London. After leaving Goldsmiths, he taught at universities and colleges across England, including fourteen years at Chelsea College of Art, a part of the University of the Arts London. David has lectured widely across the world, at places as diverse as Mumbai, Toronto and Singapore.
David’s television appearances include BBC 1’s Big Painting Challenge, in which he was a judge. He has also presented Art on the BBC, shown on BBC Radio 4. David is also Chair of Trustees at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and is a Trustee for the Art Fund.
Jane Richardson
Jane Richardson was appointed Chief Executive of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales in late 2023, where she provides inspiration, ambition, creativity, and strategic direction, while focusing on delivering Strategy 2030 across the organisation’s seven National Museums and Collection Centre. With over 20 years of leadership experience across Wales’ public and private sectors, Jane previously served as Chair of Cadw, Director of Economy and Place at Conwy County Borough Council, and a Director at Visit Wales, overseeing investments in attractions like Zip World and the Royal Mint. She spent a decade with the National Trust managing historic properties.
Phil Wang
Phil Wang is a British-Malaysian stand-up comedian, writer and actor. He recently launched his second Netflix exceptional Wang in There, Baby! and in recent years has performed stand-up on Late Night with Seth Meyers (NBC), been interviewed by chat show royalty on That’s My Time with David Letterman (Netflix), sang and danced alongside Timothée Chalamet in Wonka(2023) and his first book Sidesplitter: How to be from Two Worlds at Once was named a Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year.
Phil regularly performs stand-up to sell-out crowds around the world, and previously wrote and starred in his own BBC Radio 4 special, Wangsplaining, which won Best Scripted Comedy (Longform) at the 2020 BBC Audio Awards.
Rana Begum
The work of London-based artist Rana Begum distils spatial and visual experience into ordered form. Through her refined language of Minimalist abstraction, Begum blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture. Her visual language draws from the urban landscape as well as geometric patterns from traditional Islamic art and architecture. Light is fundamental to her process. Begum’s works absorb and reflect varied densities of light to produce an experience for the viewer that is both temporal and sensorial.
Born in Bangladesh in 1977, Rana lives and works in London. In 1999, Begum graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design and, in 2002, gained an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art.
Jenny Waldman
Jenny Waldman joined the Art Fund as Director in 2020, leading the organisation in increasing its support for the sector through its charitable funding programme, growing audiences with the National Art Pass, and championing museums and galleries with significant events, such as the Art Fund Museum of the Year, the world’s largest museum prize. Jenny was previously Director of 14-18 NOW, the UK’s art commissions programme for the First World War Centenary, Creative Producer of the London 2012 Festival, and Public programme consultant to Somerset House Trust, where she created the ice rink, film and concert seasons. She was awarded a CBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to the arts.
The first ‘Art Fund Museum of the Year’ was awarded in 2013 to the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. Its forerunner was the Prize for Museums and Galleries, administered by the Museum Prize Trust. The Art Fund supported this prize between 2008 and 2012, when it was known as the “Art Fund Prize.” The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation sponsored it from 2003 to 2007, when it was known as the ‘Gulbenkian Museum Prize’. There is a rich history of prizes for museums, the first of which ran from 1973 to 2003, called ‘The National Heritage Museum of the Year’.
The Art Fund Museum of the Year champions what museums do, encourages more people to visit, and gets to the heart of what makes a truly outstanding museum. The judges present the prize to the museum or gallery that has shown how their achievements of the preceding year stand out, demonstrated what makes their work innovative, and the impact it has had on audiences.