Daniel Weiss has made a career of bringing the world of culture and ideas together with the realm of management and leadership—and, he says, “It all started at Yale.” In 1983, after completing his bachelor of arts (in art history and psychology) at George Washington University and a master of arts (in medieval and modern art) at Johns Hopkins University, he arrived at the School of Management to pursue a master’s in public and private management. The connections he made at Yale, and the opportunities he found there, would have a profound impact on his subsequent trajectory from management consultant to doctoral candidate (earning his Ph.D. in Western Medieval and Byzantine art from Johns Hopkins in 1992) to the highest ranks of nonprofit administration.
In 2015—following a professorship and deanship at Johns Hopkins and presidencies at Lafayette College and Haverford College—Weiss joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as its president and chief operating officer, rising to his current role as president and chief executive officer two years later. The Met is the largest and one of the most diverse art museums in the world, with approximately two million objects in its collection, seven million visitors annually, and two thousand employees. During his tenure at its helm, Weiss has brought the museum from annual deficits to a balanced budget; shaped its response to the COVID-19 pandemic; led transformative changes around issues of racial equity and social justice; and initiated a project to create a new wing for modern art.
Weiss also remains a working scholar and author: he has written on such varied topics as higher education, medieval art and the Crusades, the resistance movement in the Second World War, and America’s involvement in Vietnam. His forthcoming book on the place of art museums as civic institutions within democratic societies, Why the Museum Matters, will be published this fall. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a longstanding trustee and board vice-chair of the Samuel. H. Kress Foundation, which advances the study, conservation, and enjoyment of European art; and a member or former member of numerous boards, including those of the Posse Foundation, the nonprofit Library of America, and the Wallace Foundation. He has served for numerous years as chair of the District IV Selection Committee for the Rhodes Scholarship and, at Yale, is a member of both the University Council and the School of Management Board of Advisors.
Recognition of Weiss’s achievements has spanned from pedagogical excellence (including Johns Hopkins’s three major teaching awards: the Distinguished Faculty Award, in 1994; the Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, in 1996; and the George E. Owen Teaching Award, in 2003) to management (the School of Management’s Leadership in Business and Society Award, in 2018) to civic leadership (George Washington University’s Bicentennial Monumental Alumni Award, in 2021, and City & State New York’s Fifty over 50 Lifetime Achievement Award, in January 2022). But perhaps more important than these honors has been the chance to come full circle and serve as a mentor and advisor to subsequent generations.
“There’s nothing more rewarding than going back to Yale and meeting people who are in that moment in their lives where the world of possibilities is before them,” Weiss affirms before describing a moment of mentorship from his own time as a student. At twenty-four, when he was conducting an independent study in museum leadership during his studies at the School of Management, he had the chance to meet with the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time—never imagining that one day he would hold that same office.
Weiss and his spouse of forty-two years, health care attorney Sandra Jarva Weiss, are the parents of two adult sons.