Madeleine Kennedy is a curator interested in exploring the radical potential of anti-ableism in reimagining what exhibitions can be and do. She currently works as Curator of Exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and sits on the British Council’s Artist Advisory Panel for Venice Biennale 2026. She has also served on the board of the Art Fund, the UK’s national charity for art, since 2020.
Notable exhibition projects include The Enchanted Interior, which foregrounded feminist artists’ ripostes to art history’s sinister fascination with trapped 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 forthcoming online project Imagined Exhibitions – which evolved out of her doctoral research at Oxford University – experiments with intuition-centred, collaborative and speculative curatorial methods to support artist-led projects that imagine exhibitions otherwise. Her wider curatorial research seeks to bring exhibition-making and philosophy into dialogue, with a focus on exploring the potential of exhibitions as speculative fiction, counterfactual reasoning, and worldmaking, especially through experiments with artist-led ‘pansensory’ exhibitions.
Her previous 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 running the contemporary commissioning programme at the Laing Art Gallery, working in curatorial departments at Tate Britain and Firstsite Gallery, and teaching as a lecturer in Exhibition Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She has also undertaken project-based and advisory engagements in Canada, Finland, Italy, and the USA focused on accessibility, contemporary collecting, and publishing, and sat on the 2024 selection panel for the disabled-led commissioning organisation Unlimited.
She was an inaugural member of the British Art Network’s Emerging Curators Group (2015-17) and is an alumna of Clore Leadership’s disabled-led Inclusive Cultures programme (2021). She holds an MA with distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Publications include Kelly Richardson: Pillars of Dawn (co-edited with Alistair Robinson), exhibition catalogues, essays for artist monographs, and peer-review articles on exhibition histories.
