Nicholas Serota has been Director of Tate since 1988. During this period, Tate has opened Tate St Ives (1993) and Tate Modern (2000 and extension 2016), redefining the Millbank building as Tate Britain (2000). Tate has also broadened its field of interest to include twentieth-century photography, film, performance, and occasionally architecture, as well as collecting from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Since 2010, the national role of the Gallery has been further developed with the creation of the Plus Tate network of 35 institutions across the UK and Northern Ireland.
Between 1976 and 1988, Serota was Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery where he curated numerous exhibitions including Robert Ryman (1977), Carl Andre (1978), Gerhard Richter (1979), Eva Hesse (1979), Max Beckmann: The Triptychs (1980), Anselm Kiefer (1980), Philip Guston (1982), Georg Baselitz (1980 and 1983), Bruce Nauman (1987). In recent years he has curated or co-curated exhibitions of Donald Judd (2004), Howard Hodgkin (2006) Cy Twombly (2008), Gerhard Richter (2011) and Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014).
Nicholas Serota has been a member of the Visual Arts Advisory Committee of the British Council, a Trustee of the Architecture Foundation and a commissioner on the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. He was a member of the Olympic Delivery Authority which was responsible for building the Olympic Park in East London for 2012. He is a member of the Board of the BBC and has recently become Chair of Arts Council England.