Madeleine Kennedy is an independent curator with over ten years’ experience including in-house curatorial roles at Tate Britain, Laing Art Gallery, Hatton Gallery, and Firstsite Gallery, as well as freelance roles and project-based collaborations with the National Portrait Gallery, Western Front Vancouver, MIMA, Unlimited, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA), Guildhall Art Gallery, and ICI New York.
She has curated over 25 exhibitions and commissions, including The Enchanted Interior; Exploding Collage: Nadia Hebson, Ursula Mayer, Linder Sterling; Ellen Gallagher | Francis Bacon; and Modern Visionaries: Van Dyck and the Artists’ Eye. Her publications include exhibition catalogues, artist monographs and peer-review articles on exhibition histories.
Madeleine’s current research explores exhibitions of/and/as speculative fiction, aiming in her own curatorial practice to harness the radical potential of Disability Justice to reimagine exhibitions as pansensory forms of worldmaking. Her forthcoming curatorial commissioning project Imagined Exhibitions draws on the collaborative conversation-led research at the core of her PhD at Oxford University entitled Imagining Exhibitions Otherwise.
Holding MAs in curating from The Courtauld and in philosophy and art history from St Andrews, Madeleine was an inaugural member of the British Art Network’s Emerging Curators Group (2015-18). She has served on the board of the Art Fund since 2020, at the time becoming one of only 3% of UK trustees under 30, and has been a Lecturer in Exhibition Studies at LJMU since 2023.
