Catherine Wood, 2022. Photo © Tate
Tate announced today that Catherine Wood has been appointed Director of Programme, Tate Modern. She will take up the position in August 2022, overseeing Tate Modern’s ambitious and broad ranging artistic content, including exhibitions, displays, commissions, performances, film screenings and community projects. Working with the gallery’s wider curatorial team, she will lead an innovative and engaging programme which reflects the latest developments in art, society, technology and sustainability.
Catherine Wood joined Tate Modern in 2002, having previously held curatorial roles at the Barbican Art Gallery and The British Museum. Over the last 20 years, she has been instrumental in making performance and live art a core part of Tate Modern’s programme, becoming Senior Curator, International Art (Performance) in 2015. She has worked closely with artists such as Joan Jonas, Tarek Atoui, Fujiko Nakaya, Mark Leckey, Anne Imhof, Carlos Amorales and Otobong Nkanga among many others, and has curated and co-curated major exhibitions such as The World as a Stage in 2007, Pop Life: Art in a Material World in 2009, A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance in 2012 and Robert Rauschenberg in 2016.
In recent years she led on the BMW Tate Live Exhibition series in the Tanks and played a key role in the Uniqlo Tate Play programme which launched last year. She has also been a pioneer of curating for online audiences, initiating Tate’s first live-streamed performance programme in 2012, and has played a key role in bringing live, time-based works of art into Tate’s collection, including Trisha Brown’s Set Reset and Lee Mingwei’s Our Labyrinth, both of which were staged at Tate Modern this year.
Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern, said: “I am delighted to welcome Catherine into this role, building on her outstanding work as a Curator and Senior Curator. Her innovative thinking has played an important role at Tate Modern for many years, and as Director of Programme she will help the gallery realise our ambitions for the future with great creativity and curatorial flair.”
Catherine Wood said: “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Frances Morris, and our extraordinary team, to shape Tate Modern's future programme. I look forward to bringing what I have learned from my work with artists and audiences to help navigate this period of evolution in the museum, and to think afresh about the role of art in the world, and how people encounter it at Tate Modern."