New ITP Conference Grant 2025 awarded!!
Written by Claire Messenger, Manager, International Training Programme
We are delighted to award an ITP Conference Grant 2025 to Aprille Tijam, Associate Director and Head of Exhibitions and Collections, Ayala Museum (Philippines, ITP Fellow 2019).
Aprille will use her grant to attend the The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities, ICOM General Conference 2025 in Dubai from 11 to 17 November 2025.
Aprille says that attending The Future of Museums in a Rapidly Changing Communities conference will enable her to join global museum practitioners exploring this year’s theme. With a focus on sustainability, she is keen to learn from the session’s transformative activations and diverse perspectives which will be rich resources for inspiration and potential models for programmes.
You can read more about the conference here https://dubai2025.icom.museum/
As Associate Director, Aprille has oversight of the long-and-short-term programmes of Ayala Museum. This includes building and manpower administration, facilities, and security. She is tasked as well to manage international programs and networking.
As concurrent Head of Exhibitions and Collections, Aprille directly supervises seven staff. She recently worked with curators Felipe Pereda (Fernando Zobel Professor of Spanish Art, Harvard University) and Manuel Fontan del Junco (Director for Exhibitions, Fundacion Juan March, Spain) for the iteration in Ayala Museum (Sept 2024-Jan 2025) of the exhibition Zobel. The Future of the Past, originally presented at Museo Nacional del Prado. She enabled loans with more than 30 lenders (institutional and private collections) from US, Spain, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Aprille also worked with the National Gallery Singapore for the next leg of this show (May-November 2025). Finding Zóbel Prints, showcasing the result of her 5-year research on Fernando Zóbel prints, supported by BM-ITP Research Grant (2021, 2024) is now on exhibit at Ayala Museum. Her research was prompted by her discovery of Zóbel’s donation to the British Museum-Prints and Drawings Department during her time at ITP in 2019.
Recently Aprille project managed loans with the Asian Civilisations Museum Singapore, for the Manila Galleon: From Asia to the Americas exhibition. Additionally, she is preparing to organize Philippine loans for the Manila Galleon exhibition presentation in Mexico City (Nov 2025-May 2026).
She is also working on incremental implementation of Access Programs for Persons with Disabilities: three-dimensional wooden hand-carved objects inspired by 10 dioramas are presented with English texts and braille translations.
We are delighted to be able to support Aprille this year and look forward to hearing more about her conference experience and sharing her final report with our ITP global network.