The Royal Academy has found its new Artistic Director. Helen Legg, currently Director of Tate Liverpool, will take up the role in June 2026, stepping into one of the most significant programming positions in British institutional art.
It’s a strong appointment. Legg has spent the better part of two decades building a reputation as someone who combines genuine curatorial intelligence with the capacity to run large, complicated organisations. She started at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, moved to Spike Island in Bristol as Director in 2010 — a gallery and studio complex with a programme focused on emerging and under-recognised artists, which is a particular kind of institutional challenge — and has been at Tate Liverpool since 2018. During that tenure, she oversaw a major capital transformation of the Grade I listed building, which will reopen in 2027. She steered the gallery toward a programme that more directly reflected the city and its histories. That last part is harder than it sounds.
She has sat on selection committees for British and Scottish representation at the Venice Biennale. She has judged the Turner Prize, the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, the Jerwood Drawing Prize, and the Paul Hamlyn Artist’s Awards. The range of that experience matters at the RA, where the exhibition program
Legg herself is characteristically direct about what draws her to the role. Practising artists and architects lead the RA, which houses the UK’s oldest and free art school, and is in the process of launching an expanded Collection Gallery. “The opportunity to shape the RA’s artistic programme and respond to its extraordinary gallery spaces,” she said, “is tremendously exciting.” That’s the statement that gets written off as pro forma enthusiasm, but given what she’s actually being handed, it seems fair.
Two further senior appointments join her in June. Livia Evans arrives as Commercial Director, bringing more than a decade of senior leadership from the John Lewis Partnership — experience in driving revenue across retail, hospitality, and service within values-led organisations — which translates well to the pressures of running an independent institution that receives no government funding. Lamia Dabboussy joins as Director of Brand and Audiences, having previously led audience development, marketing, visitor experience, and creative education at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. She also has senior BBC experience, which, in terms of understanding how to reach genuinely broad public audiences, is not irrelevant.
The RA was founded by George III in 1768 and has occupied its current position — independent, privately funded, led by Academicians — ever since. It doesn’t receive government money, which concentrates the mind around commercial sustainability in ways that publicly funded institutions don’t always have to confront. The combination of Legg’s programming track record, Evans’s commercial background, and Dabboussy’s audience development experience suggests the incoming leadership team has been assembled with that reality in mind.
Rebecca Salter, RA President, described the appointments as exciting. Simon Wallis, Secretary and Chief Executive, called Legg “the ideal person for the role.” Neither statement is wrong.
She starts in June. The expanded Collection Gallery and whatever she decides to do with the main exhibition programme will be worth watching closely.