Lisa Phillips (museum director)

Lisa Phillips
Born	Manhattan, New York
Occupation	Director, Curator, and Author
Title	Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art

Lisa Phillips is an American museum director, curator, and author. She is the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York City. In 1999, Phillips became the second director in the Museum’s history, succeeding founding director Marcia Tucker. Prior to beginning her directorship at the New Museum, she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art for twenty-three years.

Phillips was born in Manhattan, New York City and grew up in Brooklyn Heights. She attended Packer Collegiate Institute and received her BA in Art History with honors from Middlebury College in 1975. She studied music, art, and art history in Vienna during her junior year and spent time at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Albertina copying master drawings, there becoming interested in museums. She later entered the PhD program in Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she studied with Linda Nochlin, Rosalind Krauss, and Leo Steinberg, and took courses at Hunter College's prestigious Art History program.

Phillips began her career as an Helena Rubinstein Fellow in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program in 1976. She quickly rose to become a curator in 1982. During her twenty-two-years at the Whitney, she organized over thirty exhibitions, including the notable thematic exhibitions “The Third Dimension: Sculpture of the New York School” (1984); “High Styles: the History of American Design” (1985); “Image World: Art and Media Culture” (1989); “Beat Culture and the New America, 1950–1965” (1994); and “The American Century Part II: 1950–2000” (1999); midcareer surveys of works by Terry Winters (1986), Cindy Sherman (1987), Julian Schnabel (1987), and Richard Prince (1992); as well as a major retrospective of the work of Frederick Kiesler (1988). Known for championing midcareer and emerging artists, Phillips was also a curator for six Whitney Biennials (1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993, and 1997).

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