Tate Names Dia Leader Jessica Morgan as Next Director
The British curator will return to London to helm the museum network beginning next year.
Tate's board of trustees confirmed today, July 22, that British curator Jessica Morgan has accepted its request to serve as the next director of the institution, starting in 2027. Morgan, who worked at Tate from 2002 to 2014 and served as Tate Modern's curator of international art from 2010 to 2014, is returning to London from New York after steering the Dia Art Foundation for just over a decade.
Before beginning her curatorial career at Tate in 2002, Morgan previously served as the chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Morgan's appointment comes at a period of turbulence for Tate. The museum network's former director, Maria Balshaw, ended her nine-year tenure this year after weathering the COVID-19 pandemic and its reverberating impact on attendance and operating budget deficits, a settled lawsuit over a dispute regarding a commissioned artist program, two rounds of major layoffs, and staff strikes over low pay and poor job security, among other trials and tribulations. In the months preceding Balshaw's December 2025 exit announcement, a report on attendance data from Tate Modern and Tate Britain revealed that both London museums experienced a 27% decline in admissions and a significant downturn in young adult visitors compared to 2019.
However, Morgan is set to land at Tate shortly after an upswing in attendance and visibility this year — Tate Modern welcomed a record-breaking ticket presale figure for the Frida Kahlo exhibition that opened this summer, as well as the overwhelmingly positive reception of the concurrent Ana Mendieta exhibition and Tracey Emin retrospective. Her arrival also coincides with the set reopening of Tate Liverpool, which was shuttered for almost four years for a major renovation.
“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,” Morgan said in a press statement about her new appointment.
As a curator, she was instrumental in the growth of Tate's collection of international art and organized several art commissions for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
At Dia, Morgan oversees all of the foundation's locations, site-specific projects, long-term installations, and land art sites located across the United States and Germany. She has been credited with expanding the foundation's collection to include work by over 50 additional artists, echoing her work at Tate by focusing on acquisitions of work by women and people of color. Throughout her tenure, the foundation has developed solo exhibitions for the likes of Agnes Martin, Meg Webster, Hélio Oiticica, Lee Ufan, Roni Horn, Tehching Hsieh, and Senga Nengudi.
On the fundraising side of the job, Morgan has increased Dia's endowment by over $100 million by developing and nurturing a robust network of sponsors in her decade of service. She initiated the major renovation at Dia Chelsea, which reopened in 2021 as a contiguous throughway of three of the foundation's buildings on West 22nd Street for expanded exhibitions and programming space.
Under Morgan's leadership, the Dia staff voted to unionize in 2022 with recognition from the foundation, citing concerns including low wages and poor job security. The union ratified its first three-year contract with the museum in 2024, securing higher wage and salary floors, advanced notice for layoffs, recall rights for newly opened positions, and guaranteed pay in the event of emergency closures or inclement weather.
Lauding Morgan's “visionary revitalization of the Dia Art Foundation,” Tate's board chairman Roland Rudd described her as the “ideal person to lead Tate into a new era.”
