It is with much regret that the European Museum Forum has to acknowledge that, given the current patterns of Covid-19 contagion, the national and local restrictions to public meetings, and the bans on national and international travel, we will not be able to conduct the EMYA2020 and EMYA2021 conferences and award ceremonies as live, corporal events in May2021 as planned.

The EMYA annual conferences and award ceremonies are opportunities for benchmarking and networking, for exchange and sharing of the skills and expertise that a process of creating a new museum generates, and for exploring together the challenges renewal poses, and the personal and institutional strengths it demands. The conferences and award ceremonies are, each year, occasions of collective celebrations of the continuous self-reflection, inventiveness and innovation of our sector. Due to the pandemic, in 2020 and in 2021, we will have to translate this professional encounter into a different format than that of the last four decades.

We have now set Thursday May 6th, 2021 at 17 CET as the date for the announcement and celebration of the EMYA2020 and the EMYA2021 winners, as a public, on-line event with all the 88 nominated museums. Before the award ceremony we will find ways of ensuring that all nominated museums get a chance to present themselves, as is the EMYA tradition, albeit this year in digital form only.

The nominated museums have all been judged according to the same criteria and with the same methods as always employed by EMYA, and a full set of winners for the different awards have been selected and will be announced for each of the two seasons, for EMYA2020 and for EMYA2021.

In May 2021 the new season of applying for EMYA2022 will also have started. Let us all hope for a productive and less complicated season.

More information to follow.