Madeleine Kennedy is an independent curator committed to bringing exhibition-making and philosophy into dialogue, and exploring the radical potential of anti-ableism in reimagining exhibitions. Her curatorial experience varies from leadership roles such as Keeper of Art at the Hatton Gallery – where she helped steward the organisation’s major redevelopment and devise its re-opening exhibition programme – to freelance consulting on embedding accessibility as the basis for wider institutional transformation.
Previous curating experience includes running the contemporary commissioning programme at the Laing Art Gallery, working in curatorial departments at Tate Britain and Firstsite Gallery, and undertaking international project-based engagements in Canada, Finland, Italy, and the USA. She was an inaugural member of the British Art Network’s Emerging Curators Group (2015-17), and holds an MA with distinction from the Courtauld. Notable exhibition projects include The Enchanted Interior, which foregrounded feminist ripostes to art history’s sinister fascination with enclosed women; Exploding Collage, an experimental artist-led project which reckoned with how to ‘exhibit’ artworks that no longer exist due to biases in histories of collecting; Modern Visionaries: Van Dyck and the Artist’s Eye (in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London), which challenged gendered myths about artistic genius; and Ellen Gallagher | Francis Bacon.
Her current project Imagining Exhibitions Otherwise – which forms the focus of her doctoral research at Oxford University – centres conversation, imagination, intuition, and collaboration to question limiting conventions in exhibition-making. She is a 2021 alumna of Clore Leadership’s disabled-led Inclusive Cultures programme, and serves on the board of the Art Fund.
