As the museum sectors expand across Europe, and as the value and meaning of culture for citizenship, political empowerment and general wellbeing are increasingly recognized, the quality of each museum and its contributions to its society and communities becomes correspondingly significant. The European Museum of the Year Award has been given out every year since 1977, and represents the best in innovation and excellence, in new or redeveloped museums, across disciplines and scale, funding and obligations, and across the various cultural contexts of Europe.

The EMYA goes to a museum which contributes profoundly to our understanding of the world as well as to the development of new paradigms and professional standards in museums. Within a distinctive overall atmosphere, the winning museum shows creative and imaginative approaches to the production of knowledge, to interpretation, presentation and social responsibility - all from a transparent base of core values of democracy, human rights, and inter-cultural dialogue, a commitment to sustainability, a practice of inclusion and community participation, and a recognition of conflicts and the courage needed to confront them.

Discover the winners through the years

Within the rich economic, social and cultural diversity of its 46 member States, the Council of Europe focuses on safeguarding and promoting human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The Council of Europe Museum Prize has been awarded annually since 1977, by the Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, based on the recommendations of the EMYA jury.

The Council of Europe Museum Prize is awarded to a museum that has contributed significantly to upholding human rights and democratic citizenship, to broadening knowledge and understanding of contemporary societal issues, and to bridging cultures by encouraging inter-cultural dialogue or overcoming social and political borders. The Prize aims to highlight Europe’s diverse cultural heritage and the interplay between local and European identities.

Discover the winners through the years

As societies are increasingly openly conflicted, politicized and polarized, the obligations grow correspondingly for museums to challenge established truths and mainstream positions, to defy power, to insist on accountability, and take transparent and ethical stands - not least pertaining to issues of social justice - that give space for or voice to contested and silenced stories.

The Kenneth Hudson Award for Institutional Courage and Professional Integrity is named in honour of the irreverent and critical perspective of Kenneth Hudson, the founder of EMYA, and is given by the European Museum Forum board to a museum, a group or an individual – not necessarily an EMYA candidate - to celebrate courageous, at times controversial, museum practices that challenge and expand common perceptions of the role and responsibilities of museums in society.

Discover the winners through the years

As the quest for democratic involvement and cultural participation increases in society at large, the obligations grow correspondingly for museums to meet the growing needs and expectations of their communities for direct involvement in all aspects of the museum’s planning, development, management and execution of everyday activities and special projects.

The Silletto Prize for Community Participation and Engagement is sponsored by the Silletto Trust and celebrates a deep, continuous and empowering involvement between a museum and its stakeholders, that places the museum as a point of orientation and reference at the centre of its communities, whether these be local, national, global or otherwise defined.

Discover the winners through the years

As the gravity of climate change and the destruction of nature continues apace and the wide-ranging implications are more directly experienced in people’s everyday lives, the obligations increase correspondingly for museums to reflect and address these urgent issues and contribute to safeguarding the future for coming generations..

The Meyvaert Museum Prize for Environmental Sustainability is sponsored by Meyvaert and goes to a museum which shows an exceptional commitment to reflecting and addressing issues of sustainability and environmental health in its collecting, documentation, displays and public programming as well as in the management of its own social, financial and physical resources.

Discover the winners through the years

As all areas of the world grow increasingly interdependent and intertwined, and as Europe and the individual nations and regions within Europe grow increasingly diverse, the obligations increase correspondingly for museums to include and welcome all visitors, across class, gender, race, ethnicity, age, education or other differences in background.

The Portimão Museum Prize for Welcoming, Inclusion and Belonging is sponsored by the Municipality of Portimão and celebrates a friendly atmosphere of inclusion, where all elements of the museum, its physical environment, its human qualities, its displays and public programmes, contribute to making everyone feel they are valued and respected and belong in the museum.

Discover the winners through the years

Special Commendations are given to museums that have developed a new and innovative approach in specific aspects of their public service and from which other European museums can learn.

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The annual EMYA conference underscores the importance of participation and dialogue in promoting the values of EMF/EMYA. Innovation and public quality in the museum sector can only be achieved by supporting those working in museums and providing them with the means to exchange experiences and ideas.

Recognising the value of having a diversity of perspectives from across the European museum network present, Museum Studio sponsors a number of travel bursaries for the annual conference. The grants are prioritised for staff from candidate museums who would otherwise be unable to attend and for emerging museum professionals – the next generation of innovators.

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Agnes believes that museums are relevant to people and that participation supports cultural institutions to be relevant to visitors and users. She is interested in knowledge based technological solutions and cultural and economic creativity that heritage can support.

Agnes Aljas is a Research Secretary of the Estonian National Museum. She has studied history, ethnology and communication (University of Tartu, University of Turku and University of Aix-en-Provence).

Agnes is giving lectures on memory institutions at the University of Tartu. Her research interests and recent publications focus on audience studies, cultural participation and contemporary collecting. She was part of the team of the new building project of the Estonian National Museum (EMYA 2018, Kenneth Hudson Award).

Agnes is the chair of ICOM Estonia and a board member of ICOM’s International Committee for Museums and Collections of Ethnography (ICME). She joined the EMYA judging panel in January 2021.

Atle is a curious guy. And when he visits a museum, he is very often discovering something he didn´t knew he likes.

Atle Faye is head of communications & pr at the Oslo National Academy of the arts. He has also been director of information at the former Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority and head of communications at the National Museum.

He lives in Oslo and Berlin and is particularly interested in young contemporary art, politics and urban development and how important a new museum project can be for the development of a district or region.

Faye was a member of the jury for several years and this year he is once again re-entering the jury for the EMYA2024 competition in connection with the high number of candidates to be visited and juried.

Beat believes that museums have a creative power to launch debates, to open doors and to involve people. Just do it.

Beat Hächler is the director and curator at the Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern, Switzerland. He studied contemporary history (focus on Spain), German literature and media science in Bern and Madrid, followed by a master’s degree program in scenography in Zurich some years later.

He is interested in contemporary every day life issues and co-developped under these aspects over 18 years the profile of Stapferhaus Lenzburg (EMYA winner 2020). In Bern, he transformed the Swiss Alpine Museum since 2011 with a temporary exhibition hall, opening new perspectives beyond the Alps for global issues. Since 2020 he is part of an experimental transformation process, shaping the local existing museum cluster into a new collaborative museum’s quarter.

Beat was a board member of ICOM Switzerland and he is still active as author and curator reflecting contemporary museological practices.

Amina believes in museums as spaces for social action and drivers of change, and she is particularly interested in unlocking the potential of museums in transitional justice processes.

Amina Krvavac is the Executive Director at the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Amina was a member of a small inaugural team that led a two-year grassroots campaign culminating in the opening of the War Childhood Museum back in 2017. The War Childhood Museum has since been widely recognised and praised for its capacity to contribute to a better understanding of war-affected childhood as a complex social phenomenon.
Amina studied International Relations at the International University of Sarajevo, and Children’s Rights at the University of Geneva.

She is committed to creating exhibitions and workshops that support open and conscious dialogue, and to promoting the idea of museums as platforms for societal healing and reconciliation.

Amina is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Coalition of Site of Conscience Europe – a network of museums, historic sites and memory initiatives connecting past struggles to today’s movement for human rights. She joined the EMYA judging panel in January 2021.

Danielle is interested in developments that challenge existing concepts of collecting. Her work is very much around networks and participation. She is a strong advocate for collecting practices that centres the care for people.

Danielle Kuijten holds a Master of Museology from the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the Arts). She started her museum career as freelancer in the heritage field under the name Heritage Concepting.

Her main focus in projects is on co-ccreation, contemporary collecting, action curating and decolonization of museum praxis. This is also how she started working for Imagine IC, a pioneer in the field of heritage of the contemporary society. Here she has been active in building a participative neighbourhood archive on and in the Amsterdam district Southeast. As co-curator she produced exhibitions on topics like Black Resistance, Queering Southeast and Personal archives of 25 year Bijlmer Flightdisaster. In 2022 she was guest-curator of the first DOMiDlabs: Making Museum Design Participatory in Cologne, Germany. The labs aims to help DOMiD to create a multifaceted and engaging migration museum. Since March of 2023 she is director at Imagine IC.

Danielle is a regular guest on international conferences giving presentations and workshops and is president at COMCOL, ICOM’s international committee for collecting.

Dominika is interested in how museums interpret the changes that occur in the culture of any given land and how new technologies affect the image of a museum.

Dominika Mroczkowska-Rusiniak is a cultural manager. She studied cross-cultural psychology at the University of Social Science and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland and history at the University of Warsaw and Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy. She also obtained a post-graduate diploma at Warsaw School of Economics, Poland.

Among other professional engagements, she worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the National Museum in Warsaw. Since 2016 she has been working at the National Institute for Museums and Public Collections, where she manages an education project and co-organizes various museum award schemes.

She has been a long time national correspondent for EMF. She also lectures at the Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies at Warsaw University.

Adriana is interested in the relationship between museums as institutions and the current political situation around the world, in how museums construct discourses and ideology using collections and objects, and what their underlying purposes are.

Adriana Muñoz is a curator at the National Museums of World Culture, Sweden. She wrote her PhD in Archaeology about the relationship between collecting, labelling and political structures. She has long experience of working in museums and has worked on numerous exhibitions.

She works with ICOM (International Council of Museums) on problems around the illegal import/export of archaeological plundered objects from Latin America. Further, she has participated in several research projects in different countries since 1998 and has collaborated with a number of universities in Europe and Latin American, not only concerning archaeology, but also questions of heritage. She is a member of Americanist and museological groups; and a referee for the Journal of Museum Management (Canada) and for the Nordisk museologi (Scandinavian), as well as for the Argentinian Fund for Scientific Research and Technology.Recently she has also worked with questions of repatriation.

Born in Canada, and brought up in Greece, Mathieu is interested in cross-cultural studies of museums in contemporary contexts. He sees museums –of any kind– as being inclusive spaces that enable and empower diversity and generate meaningful social experiences.

Mathieu is director of the Office de coopération et d’information muséales (Ocim), a national observatory and think tank on museums and heritage co-funded by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation and the University of Burgundy, France. He has more than 15 years’ experience working in national museums and universities in Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Luxembourg. He also conducted extensive field research in South America, primarily Bolivia, where he spent a total of six years, as well as Brazil, where he has been working with colleagues since 2014 in the design of teaching and community engagement initiatives. Mathieu has also been developing research collaborations and workshops in Spain since 2012, particularly in Catalunya and the Basque Country. At ICOM (International Council of Museums), he serves on the board of Museum International and, since 2022, hosts the newly created ICOM Voices podcast.

Mathieu received his PhD in 2011 from the School of World Art Studies and Museology, University of East Anglia, UK. His research interests include co-curation, managerial curatorship, museum activism, memory and postmemory, politics of representation, and citizen engagement and participation.

Friedrich regards museums as sites where collaborative work can manifest change that expands far beyond their walls.

Friedrich von Bose is curator and scholar of European Ethnology and museology. He is currently senior researcher of museum studies at the Institute for Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich.

For many years, Friedrich has worked at the intersections of critical museology and curatorial practice. Before his current post he was head of research and exhibitions at the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony (Dresden State Art Collections) with the three ethnological museums in Leipzig, Dresden and Herrnhut (2020-2023), as well as deputy chief curator of Humboldt University of Berlin’s exhibition spaces in the Humboldt Forum (2017-2020). Amongst his main concerns in his curatorial and scholarly work is how the long-standing debates about museum ethics, decolonisation and provenance can manifest in new curatorial formats and practices.

He regularly serves as an advisor to museums and cultural institutions in this regard. Friedrich has been lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he acquired his PhD in 2014, as well as at the University of Basel, where he teaches culture-reflexive management at the Center for Advanced Studies since 2016. To him, working transdisciplinary across institutions and professional fields is both exciting and a central means to collaboratively create meaningful change.

Zandra Yeaman believes museums have the power to shape our understanding of the past, how this has developed our present, to enable us to create an equitable future for all.

Zandra Yeaman is the Curator of Discomfort at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. She has a background in anti-racist activism in Scotland, working for social justice and equality.

Previously, Zandra was the Community Campaigns Officer for the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, responsible for coordinating Black History Month events programme in Scotland. For more than a decade, she has assisted the Scottish arts and heritage sector, helping to question working practices, involve new audiences and ensure that anti-racism, equality and diversity is at the heart of all they do.

The Hunterian’ s Curating Discomfort programme was devised in 2021 to challenge historical power dynamics and, through ‘uncomfortable’ processes, empower new forms of collaboration between community groups, museum professionals and academics.

International recognition for ‘Curating Discomfort’ has shaped a new project, ‘Power in This Place: Unfinished Conversations’ (2022-2025) that seeks to develop further the process of change at The Hunterian.

Zandra’s work uses the museum’s collections to create narratives that no longer privilege colonisers but re-frame interpretation and acknowledge and represent our shared histories.

Exploring the legacies of Empire, Zandra works in collaboration to remove white supremacy as an economic and cultural basis through which white western ideas have exercised cultural superiority through control of knowledge, text, and institutional resources.

Zandra is the Chair of the Board of Directors at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, and is a member of the board of Directors at V&A Dundee, Scotland.

Over the past years, I have had a chance to interact with the EMYA judging panel, to learn about its work and the values it stands for, as well as its detailed evaluation process, but from the perspective of a museum candidate for one of the prizes awarded under the EMYA scheme.

In the course of this process, I understood how valuable the existence and work of EMYA is for any European museum, big or small, old or new, as it continuously inspires and motivates the museums to strive for higher quality and excellence in all aspects of their work.

Becoming a judge and finding myself on the other side of the process is an incredible honour, one that comes with great responsibility to contribute to this important mission.

Joining EMYA judging panel is an incredible opportunity to get to know and work closely with an inspiring and dedicated group of professionals on promoting and advocating for excellence and innovation in the European museum sector. The privilege that comes with being an EMYA judge also lies in visiting and learning about the incredible work of nominated museums. Engaging in meaningful conversations with a very diverse pool of professionals allows for personal and professional growth, resulting in life-enriching experience.

To be a judge means having the opportunity to learn about and understand the innovative ways in which contemporary European museums are working with different topics across diverse fields. It can be a testing duty to evaluate different museums from different traditions that work in different conditions, on different topics and with different collections.

As a jury member, I will endorse the new developments and strategies with which museums have engaged. I hope to be able to highlight practices that encourage innovative knowledge and viewpoints, that lead to creative approaches and which promote socially responsible museum work.

To be a judge involves the great opportunity and privilege to get to know many colleagues from a broad range of museums across Europe. It means learning about the outstanding work they do, how they interpret their museums’ role in society and what strategies they employ to be meaningful places for their respective communities. To visit the applicant museums and to discuss the experiences made during these visits with my fellow judges – and to hear and discuss about their insights respectively – means learning a lot on many different levels. To me, reflecting about these experiences against the background of broader museological developments and discussions is a crucial part of this process.

The collective assessment about the nominee museums also comes with a big responsibility. I see it therefore as a great honor to be able to contribute to the EMYA judging process with the experiences, assessments and professional curiosity I bring into this process. 

To be a judge is a unique chance to discover new projects, stimulating approaches, and an opportunity for empowering people all over Europe. I guess we all see in our institutions a big need to open our institutions to our diverse societies and cover relevant issues of the present and future. After a challenging project with North Korea in my house, the Swiss Alpine Museum, I am also convinced that engaged cultural projects in museums can open new doors in difficult, but relevant political contexts.

To be a judge is a chance to learn more about good practices and to become become part of a bigger community.