After more than a decade of leading the Dia Art Foundation, Jessica Morgan will return to the Tate museum network, this time as its director. She will start January 1, 2027.
In that new role, she will oversee one of England’s most important art institutions. Tate facilitates two major London museums—Tate Modern and Tate Britain—as well as institutions in Liverpool and St. Ives.
She fills a role left vacant by Maria Balshaw, who departed Tate at the end of 2025, during a period of prolonged scrutiny. The network had recently released a report that showed that it was operating at a loss. Meanwhile, Tate had also recently made cuts to its staff, leading 150 workers to go on strike.
The new role is effectively a homecoming for Morgan, who was formerly a curator of international art at Tate Modern before becoming director of Dia in 2015. Her programming for Tate roundly drew acclaim, most notably for her 2015 exhibition “The World Goes Pop,” which has been credited with internationalizing the history of Pop art. She also organized widely praised retrospectives for Saloua Raouda Choucair, Gabriel Orozco, and others.
Her leadership of Dia, a foundation that runs spaces in New York, Beacon, and Bridgehampton, as well as an array of offsite Land art installations across the nation, has continued an emphasis on global art history that could be found in her Tate programming.
Often considered one of the go-to institutions for Minimalist, Land, and Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, Dia has a collection that has historically skewed white, male, and American and European. Morgan expanded its focus to include a range of artists who had yet to receive canonization. Among those whose work Dia acquired under Morgan are Sam Gilliam, Tehching Hsieh, Senga Nengudi, Meg Webster, Renée Green, Lee Ufan, and Cameron Rowland. Exhibitions mounted under her tenure, like those for Delcy Morelos and Carl Craig, engaged with Dia’s history in compelling and unexpected ways.
In a 2022 Artnet News essay, Morgan noted that Dia’s purview was “partial to say the least” and she said the foundation had made great strides in expanding its offerings. “Focusing on supporting artists where there is real need for institutional funding has led us to the work of exceptional figures, many of whom have no gallery representation,” she wrote.
She also oversaw Dia as it doubled down on Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood it helped make it to the gallery district that it is today. In 2021, the foundation remodeled and expanded its spaces there. At the same time, Dia also introduced free admission for its Chelsea galleries.
The expansion was lauded by critics such as Roberta Smith, who wrote, in the New York Times, “In the city that never sleeps, the Dia Art Foundation seems, after a hiatus, fully awake.”
Morgan’s lauded leadership of Dia led many to speculate that she was being considered for the directorship of another New York institution, the Museum of Modern Art, though that position ultimately went to Christophe Cherix.
Writing in Vulture, journalist Rachel Corbett called the appointment “a move so safe almost no one saw it coming.” In her piece, Corbett also reported that Morgan was in contention for MoMA’s top job “until the very end,” with a source telling Corbett that Morgan had been told, “in the words of the source, that the board had ‘decreased their tolerance for risk’ since her last interview” days before Cherix’s appointment was announced. That source also said that Morgan had been told she had been “disqualified because she lacked experience leading a large-scale institution.”
