Dr Rosalind McKever is a curator and art historian specialising in 20th-century European art, its relationship to fashion and earlier periods, and its reception in Britain, the United States and South America.
She is Curator of Paintings & Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), where she works primarily with modern art, fashion and design. Her work encompasses curating exhibitions and displays, developing the collection through major acquisitions, and researching and writing on post-1900 art for academic, professional and public audiences.
Her forthcoming major exhibition, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, explores a central figure in the modern art world across Paris, London and New York and opens at the V&A in 2026. Her 2022 V&A exhibition Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear was the most visited exhibition in the UK that year (The Art Newspaper). In 2018 she co-curated Boccioni: Continuity in Space at the Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo, and later co-edited Boccioni in Brazil (EDUSP, 2022). At the National Gallery, London, she worked on major exhibitions including Monet & Architecture, Michelangelo & Sebastiano and Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire.
Her book Vanessa Bell: Modern Living was published by Thames & Hudson in 2025. She has published widely on modern art in Apollo, Art History, The Burlington Magazine, Getty Research Journal and World of Interiors, as well as in numerous edited volumes. She has written for exhibition catalogues including Courtauld Impressionists (National Gallery, 2018), Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light (National Gallery, 2019), Cézanne at the Whitworth (Manchester, 2019), Divine People: A Portrait of Ambrose McEvoy (Philip Mould, 2019), Beldy: Seta, Cotone, Lana, Raso (Studio Museo Casorati, 2024), and Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector (Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Royal Academy of Arts, 2026).
In 2025 she was the inaugural Curatorial Resident at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has previously held the Harry M. Weinrebe Curatorial Fellowship at the National Gallery, London, and the Jane and Morgan Whitney Senior Research Fellowship in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum. She has served on the Curatorial Committee for the Association for Art History and participated in professional programmes including the Association ofArt Museum Curators Engagement Program and the Getty Paper Project, Inside Drawings at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston.
She studied History of Art with Italian at the University of Leeds and completed her PhD on Italian Futurism’s relationship with the past at Kingston University in collaboration with the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in 2012. She has taught art history at Kingston University and the University of Sussex.
If you would like to talk back, please go ahead: rosalind dot mckever at gmail dot com