MEXICO CITY.- Consuelo Saizar, president of the National Council for Culture and Arts (CONACULTA), and Alfonso de Maria y Campos, general director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), invested Dr. Diana Magaloni Kerpel as the new director of the National Museum of Anthropology (MNA), one of the most important museums in Mexico and Latin America.

The CONACULTA president asked Dr. Magaloni to design a program focused in 2 essential tasks: including most recent archaeological discoveries and consolidating the relation between the museum with the national educative system to promote visits of children and young people.

Alfonso de Maria y Campos said he will continue working with the new director as he did with the recently deceased Felipe Solis, to keep renewing facilities and maintaining it in the forefront as the most important museum in Latin America.

Diana Magaloni thanked the welcome words declaring: “I am honored to form part of this team, bastion of Mexican heritage for decades. I commit to receive work proposals and critics in order to form the best work team possible”.

The new director of the National Museum of Anthropology (MNA) graduated from the INAH National School of Conservation, Restoration and Museography (ENCRyM), specializing in Restoration, where she has been academic; at the INAH National Coordination of Cultural Heritage Conservation, she is part of the team specialized in Mural Painting.

Magaloni Kerpel has been academic and researcher in national and international institutions such as Pennsylvania and Yale universities, in the United States, as well as the University of Florence in Italy; in Mexico, she has been part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and INAH.

She obtained her Art History Masters Degree in UNAM and her Doctorate Degree in the same specialty in Yale University, United States.

Her professional career has focused in the study of Mesoamerican and indigenous 16th century pictorial techniques, developing an interdisciplinary method that combines chemistry, physics, archaeology, ethnography and art history to understand how mural paintings and codices were created.

She has written several publications about Prehispanic Mural Art and is currently writing a book about images, original materials, symbolism and narrative abilities of Florentine Codex.

At the end of the ceremony, the treasurer of the Museum Board, Marcos Fastlicht Sackler, welcomed the new director to the museum, expressing the support of the group Friends of MNA.