The art historian and curator Syrago Tsiara was appointed Director of the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum by the Minister of Culture and Sports Lina Mendoni.

Syrago Tsiara is an art historian, curator and Director of MOMus – Museum of Contemporary Art ,Thessaloniki and the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. She has fifteen years of experience managing public museum organizations and twenty years of experience managing Greek and international art collections. She has curated more than fifty exhibitions in Greece and abroad, organized conferences, published scientific studies and given lectures, mainly on matters of art and politics, memory, identity, curatorial practices and the interconnection of contemporary art with archaeological sites and the public sphere.

From 2007 to 2020 she was head of the Center for Contemporary Art. From 2017 to the present she is director of the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. In 2009 she co-curated the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art – “Praxis: Art in Uncertain Times”. She was the curator of the Greek Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2017 she co-curated with Maria Tsantsanoglou an exhibition of 28 Greek artists at the Beijing National Museum of Art, as part of the 7th Beijing Biennale of Contemporary Art, organized by Greece. At the 58th Venice Biennale, in 2019, she took up the duties of national commissioner.

Born in Larissa in 1968, she studied History and Archaeology at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and continued her postgraduate studies in Social History of Art at the University of Leeds, England. Her doctoral thesis at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was on the role played by public sculpture in shaping national memory and she was awarded a doctorate in 2000. She worked on the research, study, documentation and exhibition of the Costakis Collection in Greece and abroad, while teaching at the University of Thessaly.

Since the founding,in 2018, of the Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (MOMus), she took over the management of the Museum of Contemporary Art-Collections of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2019 she worked with Dimitris Antonakakis in running the National Museum of Contemporary Art to hand it over to the public. In the same year she completed planning and  curating the  exhibition of the permanent collection of modern Greek art at the Municipal Gallery of Larissa – G.I. Katsigras Museum.