May 11, 2025 By Brad Hundt 4 min read

Like many people who acquire a fascination with history, it all started early for Amanda Dunyak Gillen.

In the years before she graduated from Charleroi Area High School in 1993, she would travel with her family to historic sites that were within a day’s drive, like the Gettysburg battlefield site or George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon, Va.

“It’s in my DNA,” Dunyak Gillen explained.

And history has also been a part of her day-to-day life for more than two decades. Dunyak Gillen received history degrees from Allegheny College and Duquesne University, and worked for a year at the Senator John Heinz History Center before landing at what is now called the Frick Pittsburgh. She has remained at the Frick for 21 years, moving up the ranks in its curatorial, education and learning departments. The director of learning and visitor experience since 2013, Dunyak Gillen was named interim executive director last year following the departure of Elizabeth Barker, who had been the Frick’s executive director since 2019.

In April, Dunyak Gillen was able to take the “interim” out of her title when the Frick’s board of trustees chose her to be the executive director of the complex, which includes its art museum, the 23-room mansion once owned by industrialist Henry Clay Frick and the Car and Carriage Museum. After a national search, the board concluded that “the best person for the job was already at the Frick,” according to Steve Pavsner, the board’s chair. “We appreciate the work Amanda has done to keep the Frick on the right course in her role as interim executive director and have tremendous confidence in her ability to steer the Frick forward.”

“It’s a privilege to have this opportunity,” said Dunyak Gillen, who has more recently made her home in Mt. Lebanon with her husband, attorney Eric Gillen, their daughter, a dog and two cats. She said her goals as executive director include making the Frick “accessible and user friendly.”

The Frick Museum was launched in 1970 and contained the art collection of Helen Clay Frick, the daughter of Henry Clay Frick. Her father was the right-hand man of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and the elder Frick amassed his own considerable fortune, some of which he poured into collecting art. But he also acquired a whiff of notoriety as a result of his union-busting tactics and his role in a violent confrontation between striking steelworkers and Pinkerton agents in a strike at the Homestead Steel Works in 1892 that resulted in 16 deaths.

During the stretch the Frick was shuttered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, Dunyak Gillen and other personnel at the museum started thinking about how that history could be integrated into tours of the mansion. Thus was born the revamped tour that’s been called “Gilded, Not Golden,” that also includes perspectives of people whose lives might have been a little bit more hardscrabble than what the Fricks experienced.

“We didn’t feel (the tours) were as useful as they could be in 2020 and 2021,” Dunyak Gillen said. Now, the tours note what life was like for, say, steelworkers who labored in Pittsburgh’s mills in the late 19th century.

“He is complicated,” Dunyak Gillen said of the elder Frick.

Aside from her work at the Frick, Dunyak Gillen has been a board member of the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums, was the president of the Historical Society of Mt. Lebanon in 2024, and teaches a graduate course on museum education and public programming at Duquesne University.

In the months ahead, Dunyak Gillen said she will be part of planning exhibits that will be at the Frick over the next couple of years, and continue to demonstrate the museum’s value at a moment when cultural institutions are facing budget cuts and questions about their missions.

“It’s very exciting to think about what comes next,” she said.