Blender Foundation announces new board and executive director

The Blender Foundation has announced a major leadership transition. Ton Roosendaal, Blender’s founder and long-time chair and CEO, will step down from those roles on 1 January 2026. Francesco Siddi, currently Blender’s COO, will take over as executive director.

The change was announced during the Blender Conference 2025 keynote and comes with a new Blender Foundation board: Sergey Sharybin as Director of Development, Dalai Felinto as Director of Product, and Fiona Cohen as Director of Operations. Roosendaal will continue supporting Blender through a newly created supervisory board.

For AEC professionals, Blender’s governance matters because Blender is a cornerstone of the free software graphics stack used across visualisation, geometry processing, openBIM workflows, and tools such as Bonsai. A planned handover to an experienced internal team is a strong signal that the project is preparing for long-term continuity while keeping its free and open source mission intact.