Sir Nicholas Serota

Nicholas Serota was appointed Chair of Arts Council England in February 2017.

Nicholas Serota was the Director of Tate from 1988 to May 2017.  During this period Tate has opened Tate St Ives (1993) and Tate Modern (2000), redefining the Millbank building as Tate Britain (2000).  Tate has also broadened its field of interest to include twentieth-century photography, film, performance and occasionally architecture, as well as collecting from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Since 2010, the national role of the Gallery has been further developed with the creation of the Plus Tate network of 35 institutions across the UK and Northern Ireland.

Nicholas Serota has been a member of the Visual Arts Advisory Committee of the British Council, a Trustee of the Architecture Foundation and a commissioner on the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. He was a member of the Olympic Delivery Authority which was responsible for building the Olympic Park in East London for 2012. He is a member of the Executive Board of the BBC.

Nicholas Serota was born in London in 1946. He studied History of Art at the University of Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute. He joined the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Visual Arts Department as a regional art officer in 1970 and then worked as a curator at the Hayward Gallery. In 1973, aged 27, he was appointed director of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford where he worked for four years before he became the Director of the Whitechapel Gallery in 1976. He succeeded Alan Bowness in 1988 as Director of Tate.

Nicholas Serota was knighted in 1999 and appointed a Companion of Honour in 2013.