Randel C. Urbano

Randel C. Urbano (b. 1983) is a museum and cultural relations professional based in Manila. While anchored in institutional work, he has spent more than fifteen years contributing to local and regional projects across graphic and exhibition design, translation and interpretation, arts management and programming, community engagement, and curatorial practice.

He currently serves as Executive Director of Museo Pambata, the Philippines’ first hands-on, interactive, and discovery-based museum for children.

His institutional experience spans over a decade in leading Philippine modern and contemporary art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in 2012–2014 and 2022–2025, the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum in 2014–2019, and Fundación Sansó in 2019. From 2019 to 2022, he was Arts Manager for East Asia at the British Council, where he worked across the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and the wider region with a focus on museums and the visual arts.

Randel has participated in several international fellowships in curatorship and contemporary museum practice. In 2015, he was a resident artist in Henryandpartners’ Autopilot Project for the exhibition [-]1: “The Great Artist of Tomorrow Will Go Underground” - Marcel Duchamp, part of the Young Artists Network programme at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. That same year, he was an MMCA International Research Fellow through the Cultural Partnership Initiative of the South Korean government in Seoul. In 2017, he was selected as the sole Southeast Asian multicultural delegate to the American Alliance of Museums-Getty Leadership and Career Management Program during the AAM Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo in St. Louis. He participated in the 2018 ICI Intensive in Bangkok.

He also received travel grants to attend the CIMAM Conferences in Barcelona in 2016, supported by The Getty Foundation, and in Buenos Aires in 2023, supported by the Fernando Zobel de Ayala grant. Most recently, he was a fellow of the 2024 Asian Artists Exchange Program of the Taiwan–Asia Exchange Foundation (TAEF), held during the Taiwan Art Space Alliance (TASA) Meetings.