Nicholas Serota has been Director of Tate since 1988. He was previously Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1976-88) and of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1973-76), having worked at the Arts Council as an exhibition organiser (1970-73). He studied History of Art at Cambridge and at the Courtauld Institute, London, where he completed a thesis on Turner's visits to Switzerland. He has selected many exhibitions, including A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy in 1981 and his Walter Neurath Lecture Interpretation or Experience: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art was published in the spring of 1997.

He has been a member of the Visual Arts Advisory Committee of the British Council (1976-98, Chairman 1992-98), a Trustee of the Architecture Foundation (1991-99) and is currently a commissioner on the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. He was knighted in 1999.