Kimberly Phillips

Kimberly Phillips is a committed arts leader, educator and writer of Welsh-Irish settler ancestry, based on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh peoples. For the past 20 years, in her roles as gallery director, curator and teacher, she has worked to amplify the voices of under-acknowledged artists and practitioners, to ethically vision and build organizational capacity, and to create meaningful and unexpected ways for contemporary artists and their publics to find one another.

Since 2020 she has held the position of Director at SFU Galleries (and now the Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum). Previous to this she was Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in Vancouver, where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, publications and artist residencies. She served as Director / Curator of Access Gallery (2013 – 2017), a Vancouver artist-run centre committed to emergent and experimental practices, and as Curator of Interpretation at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2009 – 2013). Phillips holds a PhD in art history from the University of British Columbia (2007), where she was an Izaak Walton Killam Doctoral Fellow.

Phillips’s curatorial practice maintains a particular interest in the spectral and the resistant, as well as the conditions under which artists work. She has curated over 60 exhibitions and public art projects and has edited numerous books and catalogues. She looks for unlikely collaborations that create platforms for investigating the conditions of our contemporary world; while at Access Gallery, Phillips developed the internationally recognized residency and exhibition programme Twenty-Three Days at Sea, which saw artists travel across the Pacific Ocean aboard working container vessels. 

Phillips maintains an active teaching practice. She looks to steward opportunities for learners to inhabit the art museum as a place of open inquiry, develops curriculum and instructs courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels in visual culture and curatorial practice at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she was awarded the Ian Wallace Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015.