Zelfira Tregulova

Zelfira Ismailovna Tregulova is a Russian art historian and curator who served as a director of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow between 2015 and 2023.

Early life Tregulova was born on 13 June 1955 in Riga, Latvian SSR. She graduated in 1977 from the faculty of history of Moscow State University. Since 1984, she worked as art curator specializing in Russian art. In 1993-1994, Tregulova ran an internship in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Between 1998 and 2000, she worked at the Pushkin Art Museum in Moscow, and between 2002 and 2013 at the Moscow Kremlin Museums as a deputy director. On 14 August 2013, Tregulova was appointed the director of ROSIZO, a state organization which manages exhibitions and cultural projects in Russia. In the Moscow Kremlin Museums, she organized in 2012 the first ever exhibition of contemporary art in the history of the museum, the one by Henry Moore. Generally, during her time in the Moscow Kremlin and ROSIZO, she developed a solid reputation of an art curator, both in Russian and abroad. unofficially media speculated that Lebedeva refused to support the Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in public. However, Tregulova continued with the ambitious exhibition program which was started under Lebedeva. She organized a number of highly popular exhibitions, starting from the retrospective of Valentin Serov in 2016 that generated a long queue of visitors. The Tretyakov Gallery, which is a museum of Russian art, also started exhibiting art of other countries. Furthermore, Tregulova was actively extending the museum collection by pieces of contemporary art. The demand met with anonymous rejection of museum workers and art historians in Russia, since the painting requires special treatment and needs to be kept in a closed environment. However, Tregulova was apparently ordered by the Ministry of Culture to deliver the painting, which then had to undergo restoration for six months after it was returned to the gallery.