Maria Balshaw
Maria Balshaw CBE will be conferred an honorary doctorate at the University of Sussex Summer Graduation 2026.
Maria Balshaw is clear about her influence on Britain’s cultural landscape. “While I may have been the figurehead, my role has always been to help others succeed.”
From leading the £15 million redevelopment of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery to becoming Tate’s first female director - overseeing Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives – Sussex alumna Balshaw has brought artists and audiences closer together, often in unexpected ways.
She likens her approach to that of a midwife “who is essential to the delivery but invisible when it goes well.”
Plenty has gone well.
“The beautiful transformation of the Whitworth 12 years ago is really one of the proudest things I have done,” she says. “I love going back and seeing how much people enjoy it.”
She recalls her collaboration with Marina Ambramovic as part of Manchester International Festival in 2009, which involved 14 live artists performing for 18 days, four hours at a time. “It was wild. It relaunched Marina’s career.”
At Tate she worked with Steve McQueen’s Year 3 collective portrait of 76,000 London school children, which is now in the national collection. “It took us into and out of COVID, working with schools that had never brought children to central London, never mind Tate. That was amazing.”
She also mentions Chris Ofili’s mural Requiem, (partly a memorial to artist Khadija Saye, who died in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017), on display at Tate Modern.
“Out of that learning, Chris’s mural has endured and people from that community feel that it is part of keeping what happened in the public’s mind so that something eventually will happen.”
After nine years at Tate (she stepped down in spring 2026), her final exhibition has been A Second Life, a retrospective of the work of Tracey Emin, whom Balshaw has long admired and who, she feels, has not received the respect she deserves.
“Tracey faced the most appalling misogyny for being just like male artists…you know, the scandal that she might get drunk or sleep with people or be a bit shouty.
“I realised that we could make something with her that would end all of that. When I first talked to her, she didn’t want to do a whole-career show. She only wanted us to show her paintings. But I said I wanted to do the whole show because my daughter, Lily, who’s 26, hadn’t seen her earlier work.
“When Lily saw it, she said it speaks to all of us. It’s raw and confrontational, and its tender and loving. She wants to see that whole range of emotions.”
TAKING RISKS
Balshaw recognises the importance of creating safe environments for artists that allows them to get on with their work.
“I tell them that I really don’t mind if we don’t know where we are going. I have had enough experiences throughout my career to say, well, we’re taking a risk together and nine times out of ten it will be ok.
“I like that mixture of trust-building and risk-taking that comes from working with an artist whose mind is very different from most people’s.”
Born in Birmingham in 1970, Balshaw studied English at University of Liverpool before arriving at Sussex in 1991 to study for a Masters in Critical Theory.
“I was encouraged by one of my tutors, feminist film theorist Linda Ruth Williams, who had been at Sussex. She said, ‘They are reinventing the humanities and there is an interdisciplinary collision. You’re an excellent student, you will be around the right people, and you will love it’.”
Balshaw also received encouragement from her parents who had lived in Brighton when they were first married. “My dad had trained at horticultural college, and his first serious job was as a parks’ designer and advisor for Brighton Council. He helped redesign Preston Park.”
STUDYING AT SUSSEX
Sussex lived up to her expectations. She took modules in Sexual Dissidence – a groundbreaking new postgraduate course run by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Psychoanalytic Theory with Rachel Bowlby, and the Modern American Novel and Critical Theory with Pete Nichols. She also attended extra-curricular lectures on West African studies, and felt inspired by visiting speakers, such as artist Isaac Julien, and novelist Kathy Acker.
After receiving a distinction for her MA, she was encouraged to study for a doctorate, which she did on African American Visual and Literary Culture.
“I had always been interested in African American women’s writing - Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. But I also started to be fascinated in the visual arts of that period. My research ended up being about the 1920s and 30s, but through a theoretical lens. This was quite unusual, for writing about literature at all, but definitely for writing about African American literature.”
She received Humanities Research Board funding to study for two of the three years of her doctorate, supplementing her income by working in a local restaurant, The Black Chapati “where I learned how to cook extremely good south Indian food”.
After Sussex, Balshaw taught at the universities of Roehampton and Northampton, where she met and married her first husband, American studies historian Liam Kennedy. She then took up a teaching post at the University of Birmingham but, following the birth of her two children, Jake and Lily, she struggled to reignite her passion for academia.
“I could see that engaging with students and engaging with the public and having a wider audience, and all the things that I liked, were not valued. I would have to stop doing the student stuff if I wanted to be a research leader.”
ART AND COMMUNITY
She was given a two-year sabbatical to take up a role in arts and education in the community, which she loved and found purposeful.
“Birmingham thought it would help build partnerships with the city and open doors for the university. Now lots of universities have roles that sit between the city and the cultural institutions.”
When she took the role at the Whitworth, part of the University of Manchester, she was given a similar remit.
“I had a steep learning curve, getting to really understand the museum and its collection properly, but I loved working at the Whitworth because I do like being surrounded by academics. And I liked the public coming in.”
She was then invited to take on Manchester City Galleries and become head of culture for the city. The additional responsibilities earned her the moniker “northern powerhouse in her own right”, especially after she helped to raise money from Chancellor George Osborne to fund major regional projects, including a £78m investment for a massive new arts venue, Factory International (The Factory).
In 2017 she took over Tate from Sir Nicholas Serota, who had been director for 30 years. Despite the enormity of the role and its many demands, she realised that motherhood had prepared her well.
“I wouldn’t have had a life if I hadn’t been organised when my children were small. I also have a lot of energy – always have five things on the go at the same time. And I’m good at persuading people to do things… delegating out, galvanising other people.”
Her next position, from September 2027, will be as Master of University College Oxford. She is taking over from Baroness Valerie Amos in a role that steers the college for the benefit of the students. “It’s a platform for creative practice and thinking. I hope to establish an artists in residence scheme so that I get to work with artists alongside academics. It feels like a summation of both parts of my career.”
In the meantime, as an avid gardener, she is delighted that before she takes up the job she will have “two growing seasons” in her garden in Kent.