Met Museum’s Sree Sreenivasan Will Not Attend Male-Only Panels

He wants a 'mini-movement.'

Sree Sreenivasan. Photo: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Digitas.

If you put together a panel discussion with all men on the stage, prepare to get called out; there’s even a Tumblr called “Congrats, you have an all-male panel!

And, as of now, prepare for that panel not to include Sree Sreenivasan, the first Chief Digital Officer at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He pledged to his daughter that he wouldn’t participate in any such event, and now, according to a Facebook post, he’s doubled down: he’s not even going to attend any such panels.

“How do we make this into a mini-movement?” he asks in the post.

“I have been saying no all-male panels for me and talked myself out of several appearances as a result,” he told the Poynter Institute. “I have decided the only way to do something is to call out the organizers who put these on. I call them out privately, but I am trying to make a point.”

Sreenivasan took up his post at the museum in August 2013, and he’s aimed to reach audiences around the globe. Among his initiatives, he’s worked to circumvent Chinese censors by creating an account with Weibo, a popular microblogging site. A year later, the museum’s Instagram account, run by Taylor Newby, won a Webby award.

You can catch Sreenivasan in New York at the City University of New York’s Social Media Weekend, June 10-11. Among the women making presentations are the Wall Street Journal’s Carla Zanoni (“Three Great Messaging Stories”), Gianni Riotta of La Stampa (“Is Social Anti-Social?”) and Nancy Groves of the United Nations (“Making Mobile Work, Day to Day”).


Follow Artnet News on Facebook:


Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.