Tara McDowell

Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is Editor-at-Large of The Exhibitionist, a journal on curatorial practice and exhibition making for which she served as Founding Senior Editor, now published and distributed by The MIT Press. She has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where she mounted over two dozen group and solo exhibitions. In addition to her contemporary curatorial work, McDowell has organized group shows on Minimalism, Fluxus, assemblage, and avant-garde cinema, and worked on retrospectives of Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter, and Richard Tuttle. She publishes and lectures frequently, and writes criticism for art-agenda and artforum.com. McDowell holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include exhibition histories, contemporary curating, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, alternative archives and forms of documentation, and historical and contemporary models of experimental arts education.