We have been eagerly awaiting this announcement since the Venice Biennale, but it has now been confirmed that Jessica Morgan, currently Director of Dia Art Foundation in New York, has been appointed the tenth Director of Tate, taking up the role on 1 January 2027. The appointment was announced by Tate Chairman Roland Rudd and the Board of Trustees, and approved by the outgoing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Morgan succeeds Maria Balshaw CBE, with Karin Hindsbo, Deputy Director of Tate and Director of Tate Modern, serving as Interim Director until Morgan takes up the position.
Morgan, who was born in London in 1968, is not a stranger to Tate. She worked there for twelve years, first as Curator from 2002 to 2010 and then as The Daskalopoulos Curator of International Art at Tate Modern until 2014. During that period she organised a substantial body of exhibition work, including retrospectives of Martin Kippenberger, John Baldessari, Gabriel Orozco and Saloua Raouda Choucair, the group shows Common Wealth and The World Goes Pop, and several Unilever Series commissions for the Turbine Hall. She also played a significant role in building Tate’s collection, particularly in mid-century and emerging art from North America, the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.
She left for New York in 2015 to lead Dia Art Foundation, the multi-sited organisation whose programme encompasses site-specific commissions, a growing permanent collection and major Land art installations across the United States and Germany. Her decade at Dia has been one of considerable expansion. She oversaw the renovation and reopening of Dia’s Chelsea galleries as a 32,500-square-foot facility, led two capital campaigns that raised the organisation’s endowment to nearly $200 million, an increase of 400 per cent, and acquired Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation for the permanent collection. She introduced free admission across Dia’s sites and broadened the collection substantially, adding major bodies of work by Mary Corse, Sam Gilliam, Joan Jonas, Anne Truitt, Lee Ufan and others. Under her direction, Dia also made its first commission outside the continental United States since 1982, realising Allora and Calzadilla’s site-specific work Puerto Rican Light in a remote area of Puerto Rico in 2015.
Her recent curatorial work includes a Lee Ufan retrospective at SMAC in Venice in 2026, a Dan Flavin exhibition at Malba in Buenos Aires earlier this year, and the acclaimed group show Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, which ran through 2025 and 2026. She served as artistic director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014 and sits on advisory boards including those of Haus der Kunst in Munich, MACBA in Barcelona and the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai.
Morgan holds an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art and undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from Cambridge. She was a Mellon Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art and a Contemporary Art Curatorial Fellow at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.
Roland Rudd described her as an exceptional leader whose revitalisation of Dia, combined with her earlier years at Tate and her international network, made her the right person to lead the institution into its next chapter. Morgan said she considered it an immense privilege to return and that her time as a curator at Tate had informed everything she had done at Dia in the intervening years, with artists and the public always at the centre.
She joins at a significant moment for the organisation. Tate Liverpool, currently closed for transformation, is due to reopen in 2027. Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate St Ives continue to draw millions of visitors annually, and the institution holds the largest arts membership in the world with over 160,000 Tate Members and 190,000 members of Tate Collective for those aged 16 to 25.
Image credit: Jessica Morgan. Photo by Gabriela Herman.
Morgan becomes the tenth Director in Tate’s History, following Sir Charles Holroyd, D.S. MacColl, Charles Aitken, James Bolivar Manson, Sir John Rothenstein, Sir Norman Reid, Sir Alan Bowness, Sir Nicholas Serota and Maria Balshaw.