Kate Bryan


Kate Bryan is a British art historian, curator and arts broadcaster. In 2016 Bryan became Head of Collections for Soho House globally. Bryan wrote and presented the art television series Galleries on Demand which aired every week in 2016 on Sky Arts. She is a judge on the Sky Arts television series Artist of the Year presented by Stephen Mangan and Joan Bakewell. She has been a contributor to the arts television programme The Culture Show on BBC2, Newsnight on BBC2 and in 2013 presented an hour long special for The Culture Show on The Art of Chinese Painting. In 2016 she was a presenter of the Sky Arts documentary The Mystery of the Lost Caravaggio which aired in Italy as Operazione Caravaggio. She also contributed to Dante's Inferno, Raphael and Beauty and Artemisia Gentileschi: Painting to Survive on Sky Arts. In 2018 she presented an hour long live broadcast from Tate Modern on the Picasso 1932 exhibition, also on Sky Arts.

Education

She received her BA from Warwick University in 2003. She obtained her Mphil from Hong Kong University in 2010. Her thesis subject was images of the Penitent Magdalene in Italian Renaissance Art. In 2014 she won the Arts and Culture category of the . She is a mentor for young women in the arts.

Career

She started her career at The British Museum and in 2006 worked on the exhibition. She lived in Hong Kong from 2007-2011 and was Gallery Director of . She was a contributing editor for and contributed art related articles to the South China Morning Post, Time Out London and The Guardian. She has worked as an expert guide for and .
Bryan has worked in the commercial art world as an art dealer in Hong Kong and London. She was fair director of a global art fair in London, Art15. Kate Bryan was a director of the art dealership Fine Art Society on New Bond Street in London between 2011-2015. Bryan directed the Contemporary exhibition programme and notable exhibitions include What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me in 2014 which marked 100 years since Marcel Duchamp created the readymade, Chris Levine Light 3.142 in 2013, Rob and Nick Carter Transforming including a display for the artistic duo at The Frick Collection in New York City and an exhibition in which she invited the British Pop Artist Peter Blake to select his favourite works from the gallery vaults entitled Things I Love at the Fine Art Society in 2012.
Since 2016 she has curated the global art collection for Soho House, comprising over 5000 artworks on permanent display across 8 countries. In April 2016 she curated the Vault 100 art collection for The Ned London. The art collection highlighted gender disparity in both finance and the artworld by reversing the FTSE 100 CEO gender ratio, Bryan acquired the work of 93 women and 7 men.
In October 2018 she curated Not 30% at The Other Art Fair London, presenting the work of 30 female artists in a separate space as part protest, part exhibition.

Writing

In June 2019 Quarto Press published The Art of Love by Bryan which profiles 35 artist couples over 140 years. She coauthored A Little Book of Portraits released in conjunction with the Sky Arts series Artist of the Year and has written essays for several published exhibition catalogues including those for Belinda Fox and Sir Peter Blake.

Works