Madeleine Kennedy is an independent curator and Lecturer in Exhibition Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. 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 roles focused on accessibility, contemporary collecting, and publishing. She sits on the 2024 selection panel for the disabled-led commissioning organisation Unlimited, and has 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. Publications include Kelly Richardson: Pillars of Dawn (co-edited with Alistair Robinson), essays for numerous artist monographs, and peer-review articles on exhibition histories.
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. 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. Alongside this Madeleine is committed to exploring the radical potential of anti- ableism in reimagining what art institutions can do, especially through experiments with artist-led ‘pansensory’ exhibitions.
Previous curating roles include running the contemporary commissioning programme at the Laing Art Gallery, working in curatorial departments at Tate Britain and Firstsite Gallery, and undertaking 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. She is a 2021 alumna of Clore Leadership’s disabled-led Inclusive Cultures programme.
