Es Devlin has been appointed Artistic Director of the 2026 British Museum Ball, taking place on Saturday 17 October. Her practice has always been about the transformation of shared space, about what happens when large numbers of people occupy an environment that has been carefully, almost invisibly, shaped to produce a collective experience.
Handing her the run of one of the world’s most-visited institutions for a single night and asking her to create something memorable is an inspired one. The evening’s theme is red. Not arbitrarily. The British Museum’s autumn programme this year is anchored by three exhibitions that share the colour as a thread: the once-in-a-millennium loan of the Bayeux Tapestry from France, its embroidered wool carrying that characteristic warm red through eleven centuries of narrative; a special display marking 250 years since the founding of the United States, with the flag’s stripes as an unavoidable visual reference; and a landmark exhibition on two thousand years of Korean creativity, in which red recurs across centuries of objects. Devlin will work with all three as source material, building an evening in which art, history, performance, and fashion converge, as the Museum describes it. Red is also, the institution notes, the earliest pigment known to have been used by humans in artistic expression, which gives the choice a deeper resonance than a purely aesthetic one.
The inaugural Ball in 2025 welcomed nearly 900 guests, 70% of whom were new to the Museum, and raised more than £2.5 million for the institution’s international partnerships. The 2026 proceeds will support the British Museum’s Masterplan, a large-scale redevelopment programme intended to reimagine how millions of visitors experience the collection. Igor Tulchinsky, founder, chairman and chief executive of WorldQuant, serves as the evening’s honorary chair in recognition of his support for the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition.
Nicholas Cullinan, the Museum’s Director, has described the Ball as embodying the institution’s role as a global meeting place for cultures, ideas and creativity. Devlin’s own statement is characteristically direct. The Ball, she said, will help the British Museum continue to offer free, immediate access to over six million people each year for two million years of human history. She called it an honour to play her part.
Devlin was born in London in 1971 and has spent the past three decades building one of the most wide-ranging practices in contemporary design. Stage design sits at the centre of it, from productions at the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera, to Olympic ceremonies for London 2012 and Rio 2016, to Super Bowl halftime shows in 2021 and 2022, to monumental illuminated stage sculptures for stadium concerts by some of the most commercially significant musicians on the planet. The scale varies enormously. The underlying interest does not. She consistently describes an audience as a temporary society, and her work, wherever it appears, is concerned with what that society might do, feel, or become together.
Her public installations have appeared outside Tate Modern, in Trafalgar Square, at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, at Castle Howard, at Miami Beach and at Lincoln Centre. Inside, she has worked at the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A, the Serpentine, the Imperial War Museum and Somerset House. She was the first female architect of the UK Pavilion at a World Expo, in 2020. A retrospective at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York has been followed by monographic exhibitions opening in 2026 at London’s Design Museum, Casa Bradesco in São Paulo, Futura in Seoul and Powerhouse Parramatta in Sydney. Her practice is the subject of a monographic book, An Atlas of Es Devlin.
The awards are considerable: three Olivier Awards, a Tony, an Ivor Novello, the London Design Medal, the Eugene McDermott Award for the Arts at MIT, honorary doctorates from Bristol and Kent. She was made CBE. She holds fellowships at the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal Society of Arts, UAL and Bloomberg, and is a visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford.
What she does with the British Museum on the night of 17 October will be worth watching.
Top Photo Es Devlin (Detail) by Victor Picon courtesy British Museum