IMWD International Museum Workers Day is now IMPD International Museum Professionals Day.
Ten Plus One: International Museum Workers Day After the Tenth Curtain Call
Every museum has two performances running at once.
The first is the one the public sees: the polished exhibition, the composed wall text, the spotlight that lands on an object with the confidence of a prima donna hitting center stage. The second is the one without which the first would collapse before intermission: installation crews, conservators, educators, registrars, handlers, cataloguers, technicians, visitor-services teams, researchers, writers, security staff, volunteers, and all the rest of the impossible orchestra. International Museum Workers Day was founded to make that second performance visible, and the 2025 deck reads like a vivid retrospective after the applause has grown global.
IMWD began in 2015 as a year-round project and annual advocacy event. Its mission was, and remains, admirably clear: to introduce the general public to the many professions tied to the creation, research, discovery, and presentation of heritage. The 2025 deck names Homa Taj Nasab as the project’s initiator and describes the event as a public-facing effort to reveal the breadth of museum labor. That breadth is the whole point. IMWD does not merely praise “staff” in the abstract, as if everyone in a museum emerges from the same hatch in identical sensible shoes. It restores specificity. It names the labor. It returns texture to the machinery.
In its first incarnation, the project wore a lighter costume. It was called Hug A Museum Worker, tagged with the memorable handle #HAMuseumW. Charming, a little unruly, and almost guaranteed to generate at least one misunderstanding per time zone. Sure enough, after two years spent explaining that the hugging was not intended literally, the event was renamed International Museum Workers Day in 2017. It was a tidy correction, but the old title still lingers like a curtain-raiser with excellent comic timing. IMWD has always understood something museums themselves occasionally forget: seriousness and play are not enemies.
By 2017, the project had already become strikingly ambitious. IMWD personally invited art, design, heritage, and museum workers, as well as institutions and associations, in 192 countries. That detail deserves emphasis because it reveals the ethos of the whole enterprise. This was not a campaign tossed into the algorithmic surf with fingers crossed. It was built through direct outreach, repeated contact, and old-fashioned persistence. Even after launching through social media, IMWD continued to reach out directly to tens of thousands of heritage professionals rather than surrender entirely to digital chance. One might call it advocacy by hand, with a very full inbox.
The response was enormous. In its third year, IMWD2017 engaged heritage professionals from more than 150 countries. The list runs from Bhutan, Azerbaijan, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Moldova, Chad, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tonga, Mozambique, Ghana, Cameroon, Belize, Oman, Madagascar, Jordan, Swaziland (Eswatini), Botswana, Congo, Jamaica, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Benin, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, Brunei, Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire, Malaysia, Burkina Faso, Togo, the Dominican Republic, Mali, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, and Yemen, to many more across the Americas and Europe. The point is not merely that the map turned red with participation. It is that museum labor, so often framed as local, specialist, and institution-bound, was suddenly visible as a global condition.
Then came 2018, with the beautifully direct theme Museums Beyond Borders. IMWD2018 was marked in 21 languages across 12 platforms, adding 20 new participating countries and bringing the total to 170. Here the project began to sound less like an annual celebration and more like an argument about the nature of heritage itself. Museums do not live only inside walls. They live inside translation, migration, exchange, influence, dispute, and collaboration. A multilingual, multicultural event was not simply a flourish. It was a structural declaration.
The 2025 deck makes that philosophy explicit. IMWD says it may be viewed, in some regards, as the Switzerland of heritage projects, drawing its strength from inclusivity while remaining multicultural and multilingual. It also lays out its principals with unusual candor: it is not yet affiliated with regional, national, or international institutions or alliances; not aligned with religious or political groups; impartial, though not neutral; aware of the importance of strategic partnerships and focused regional policies; pragmatic about long-term public-private partnerships; and not funded by regional or national for-profit or non-profit entities. Many organizations write mission statements that sound as though they were assembled from spare diplomatic upholstery. IMWD’s principles, by contrast, sound like they have survived contact with reality.
In 2019, the project turned toward environmental urgency. Inspired and alarmed by the 2019 United Nations report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IMWD dedicated its fifth anniversary, on Thursday, October 24, 2019, to Sustainable Heritage. This was a smart broadening of the frame. Once one begins to champion museum workers, one inevitably arrives at the question of what, exactly, their labor is trying to sustain. Not only objects, surely. Also ecosystems of knowledge, care, biodiversity, memory, and access.
The examples in the deck make that point quietly and well. A text by Tadasu K. Yamada reflects on research in a natural history museum, examining stranded whales and dolphins, collecting specimens, and preserving them as heritage for researchers around the world. A butterfly display from Oman sits beside the sustainability language with almost theatrical neatness, as if to say: preservation is not an abstract virtue. It has scales, wings, tissue, bone, labor, and time.
In 2020, IMWD expanded sideways into sport, partnering with the newly formed Global Sports Heritage Association and acknowledging commitment to UNESCO’s International Charter of Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport. The resulting #SportsIMWD took place on Thursday, October 22, 2020. GSHA, founded in April 2019, is described as promoting sporting culture, history, and heritage across generations and around the globe, with equal emphasis on recreational sports and physical activities. The UNESCO Charter is presented as a rights-based reference for policy and decision-making in sport, one that promotes inclusive access without discrimination and sets ethical and quality standards. In lesser hands, this might have felt like a tangent. Here it reads as an expansion of the same thesis: heritage is not static, and culture does not end where the trophy cabinet begins.
Then the pandemic swept in and locked the doors.
Yet the project did not stop. At the height of Covid-19, IMWD continued inviting museum and heritage workers to celebrate #IMWD2021, even while the majority of museums were under international lockdown, with online celebrations held on Friday, October 22, 2021. The 2025 deck also shows continued outreach for #IMWD2022 through direct emails, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It is one of the more moving aspects of the retrospective. When museums could not gather bodies, IMWD gathered professions. When institutions closed physically, the field remained socially alive.
By 2023, as museums reopened more fully to the public, the tone shifted again. The deck notes that thousands of heritage workers celebrated #IMWD2023 across museums opening their doors on Friday, October 20, 2023. The imagery is especially vivid here: installs in progress, teams posing in galleries, workers back in the rooms where culture becomes public. The return feels less like normality than like a second opening night.
And then comes the crucial line. Tuesday, October 22, 2024 marked the tenth International Museum Workers Day. The deck says plainly that this became a moment to review the mission and path forward. That is why 2025 feels, to borrow your excellent phrase, like ten plus one. Not a mistaken tenth, but an after-tenth reckoning. A coda. A fresh act after the house has seen what the production can do.
Perhaps the best thing about the 2025 deck is that it preserves IMWD’s sense of humor alongside its institutional seriousness. One image describes the local museum worker as curator, registrar, educator, officer, full-time volunteer, fundraiser, and part-time paid staff member all at once, juggling daily chores. Another shows a “curator round table” guessing whose exhibition will be axed next. These are jokes, yes, but jokes with professional mileage. They speak the dialect of those who know that museums run on devotion, improvisation, and occasionally absurd levels of administrative gymnastics.
That is the project’s real accomplishment over this ten-plus-one arc. It has made museum labor visible without embalming it in piety. It has remained witty without becoming flimsy, principled without becoming pompous, international without becoming vague. It understands that heritage is held together by people, and that people are at their most dignified when they are seen clearly, neither romanticized into saints nor flattened into payroll categories.
Check out the REPORT for 2015-2024.
