Deborah Smith is a curator and previous director of the Arts Council Collection, the most widely circulated national collection of modern and contemporary British art. She has worked as curator for a number of decades, exploring different strategies for collaboration and the presentation of interdisciplinary practices. She has delivered exhibitions alongside large-scale commissions, residencies, and publications, interwoven with programmes of learning, engagement and interpretation.

Projects have been developed in galleries and in the public realm with internationally respected organisations such as Hayward Touring, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, Camden Arts Centre, Chapter, and the Contemporary Art Society. Her work has included Curator, Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme at Birmingham Museums Trust and Head of Programmes (Interim) at the Serpentine Galleries. Deborah worked with Arup (global company of engineers, architects and planners), with Invisible Dust, an organisation specialising in art and science, and recently curated the exhibition ‘Human conditions of clay’ in collaboration with Chapter, touring to John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. In addition she is a shadow board member of The Box, Plymouth,  on the Art Collection Committee at the University of Warwick and on HS2’s Independent Design Panel.

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