Jessica Morgan has been appointed the new Director of Tate, the art institution’s Chairman and Trustees announced today.
Morgan succeeds Maria Balshaw, who stood down in December 2025 after helming the Tate since 2017.
Currently based in New York, Morgan has been Director of Dia Art Foundation since 2015. Her appointment is something of a homecoming, having previously worked at Tate Modern as The Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, from 2010 to 2014, and as Curator at Tate from 2002 to 2010. Recent curatorial efforts include a retrospective of Lee Ufan at SMAC, Venice (2026), and group show Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris (2025-26). She was artistic director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014. Morgan also sits on various advisory boards, including the Sounding Board for Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; the Advisory Committee for the Collection, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain; the Advisory Committee for Khao Yai Foundation, Thailand; and the Advisory Board for the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Mumbai, India.
Morgan studied undergraduate Art History at Cambridge Univerity, and masters at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was a Mellon Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art, Yale University, and a Contemporary Art Curatorial Fellow at The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.
‘Tate is undoubtedly the world’s foremost institution for international modern and contemporary art and for British art, leading the field through its collection and exhibition programme,’ Morgan said in a statement. ‘My time as a curator at Tate deeply informed my work in the last eleven years steering Dia Art Foundation, with artists and our public always at the centre of what we do. I look forward to this pivotal next stage at Tate, and most importantly, continuing and advancing the incredible work of Tate’s committed and talented team in the years to come.’
Despite reports of post-Covid decline in visitors numbers, Tate remains the most visited modern art museum in the world as of 2025 and has built the largest arts membership totalling 150,000.
