Top 200 Collectors

The daughter of Russian oil magnate Alexander Zhukov, Dasha Zhukova, who founded the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow with her former husband—and fellow Top 200 collector—Roman Abramovich, was an early investor in Artsy.

She is also a founding board member of the recently opened $475 million New York performance venue, the Shed. “The program is experiential, which is something that people are craving these days,” she told Town & Country of the multidisciplinary art center in Hudson Yards. Work at the Shed, Zhukova told T&C, allows for a kind of flexibility not shared with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on whose stately board Zhukova also serves. “Just as the Shed building is very nimble, the experience on the board feels a bit more nimble as well,” she said.

Her divorce with Abramovich was rumored at the time as the most expensive split in British history, though the details of the settlement were kept well under wraps. “After 10 years together, the two of us have made the difficult decision to separate, but we remain close friends, parents, and partners in the projects we developed together,” read a statement released in 2017, noting that the pair was “committed to jointly raising our two children” and still dedicated to their joint ventures, including Garage.

Today the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow is among the most-visited art venues in the city. In 2016, Vice Media acquired Zhukova’s Garage magazine, which ceased publication in 2021. In 2019, Zhukova married Stavros Niarchos, whose family also appears on the Top 200 Collectors list, in Paris.