Sir Nicholas Serota, CH

Nicholas Serota was appointed Chair of Arts Council England in February 2017. He is also a member of the Board of the BBC.

Previously he was Director of Tate between 1988 and 2017. During his directorship, Tate opened Tate St Ives (1993) and Tate Modern (2000, expanded in 2016), redefining the Millbank building as Tate Britain (2000). Tate also broadened its field of interest to include 20th century photography, film, performance and occasionally architecture, as well as collecting from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The national role of the gallery was further developed with the creation of the Plus Tate network of 35 institutions across Great Britain 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 the London 2012 Summer Olympics.

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 he was appointed director of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford where he worked for three years before he became the Director of the Whitechapel Gallery in 1976.

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

Term of appointment: 1 February 2017 – 31 January 2025