Kate Fowle is the director of MoMA PS1. She was appointed in 2019 after six years as the inaugural chief curator of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, and director-at-large at Independent Curators International, New York. During her tenure at Garage, she oversaw the institution’s transition from art center to internationally recognized, public-facing museum, establishing new infrastructure and developing departments of exhibitions, archives, education, public programs, performance, publishing, research, development, and communications. Ms. Fowle also worked closely with Rem Koolhaas and OMA to oversee the design and opening of Garage’s first 56,000-square-foot Museum building in 2015.Ms. Fowle’s curatorial projects at Garage included exhibitions and commissions with David Adjaye, John Baldessari, Sammy Baloji, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Broodthaers, Olga Chernysheva, Urs Fischer, Rashid Johnson, Irina Korina, Robert Longo, Andrei Monastyrsky, Anri Sala, Taryn Simon, Juergen Teller, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others. In 2014 she established Field Research, the first research-oriented program in Russia for artists, and in 2017 she established Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art.Ms. Fowle’s recent writing includes catalogue texts on Rasheed Araeen, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Ari Marcopoulos, Sterling Ruby, Althea Thauberger, and Qiu Zhijie. She has authored three books—Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo (2016); Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade 1986–1996 (2016); and Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates (2016)—and established a number of publications series, including Perspectives on Curating, featuring Terry Smith (2012/15) and Zdenka Badovinac (2019), and the Artists Sourcebook, featuring Martha Wilson (2011), Allen Ruppersberg (2014), and Apichatpong Weerawesethakul (2016).
From 2009 to 2013, Ms. Fowle was the executive director of Independent Curators International (ICI). She led the organization out of deficit and transformed it into the largest global network for curators. She also founded ICI’s signature program, the Curatorial Intensive, the first itinerant, short-term international professional training program for curators. Previously, Ms. Fowle was the inaugural international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing from 2007 to 2008 and chair of the Master’s Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which she cofounded in 2002. Before moving to the United States, Ms. Fowle was codirector of Smith + Fowle in London. From 1994 to 1996 she was curator at the Towner Art Gallery and Museum in Eastbourne, East Sussex.