Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani

Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani (born 29 September 1983) is the chairperson of Qatar Museums, a daughter of Qatar's former Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and a sister of the current Emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. After graduating from Duke University in 2005 she founded the philanthropic organisation Reach Out To Asia, and in 2010 she founded the Doha Film Institute. Ranked among the most influential figures in the art world, she has overseen record acquisitions for Qatar Museums, including the 2015 purchase of Gauguin's 'When Will You Marry?'. ^{1 2}

Al-Mayassa was born on 29 September 1983; the English article's infobox names Geneva as her birthplace, while the Arabic article's infobox names Doha. ^{1 3} Her father is Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of Qatar from 1995 to 2013, and her mother is Moza bint Nasser al-Misnad, his second wife. ¹ She graduated from Duke University in 2005 with a BA in political science and literature, having spent the 2003–2004 year at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Sciences Po. ¹ On 6 January 2006 she married Jassim bin Abdulaziz Al Thani, a second cousin, at Al-Wajbah Palace in Doha; they have four sons and a daughter. ¹ In 2019 she and her husband were sued by three British and American workers who claimed they had been made to work long hours without overtime; both denied the claims and settled without admission of liability. ¹

On graduating, Al-Mayassa founded Reach Out To Asia, a philanthropic organisation providing quality education to victims of natural disasters in Asia. ¹ As chairperson of Qatar Museums she has directed an acquisitions programme reported by Bloomberg to run to an annual budget of about one billion dollars; purchases under her leadership include Cézanne's 'The Card Players' in 2012 for $250 million and, in 2015, Gauguin's 'When Will You Marry?' for $300 million, then a record price for a painting, and she has staged major exhibitions in Qatar with Takashi Murakami, Richard Serra and Damien Hirst. ³ She founded the Doha Film Institute in 2010, which partnered with the Tribeca Film Festival on the Doha Tribeca Film Festival and announced a $100 million feature film fund with Participant Media in 2013. ¹ She co-chairs Fashion Trust Arabia, launched in 2018 to find and nurture Arab designers, sits on the board of trustees of the Qatar Foundation, became vice chairman of the Education Above All Foundation and an independent director of Soho House in 2021, and serves on councils of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum. ¹ She was listed as the most influential person in art on Art+Auction's top-10 list and ArtReview's Power 100, and appears on the Time 100; in December 2023 she launched her podcast 'The Power of Culture'. ¹

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