Lisa Phillips
Summer Series Speaker
Lisa Phillips is the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, and has been Director since 1999. The New Museum, founded in 1977, is the only museum in New York exclusively dedicated to international contemporary art and emerging ideas in culture.
During her tenure, she has quadrupled the size of the Museum, its Board, staff, budget, and attendance, turning the Museum into a critically acclaimed, leading international cultural destination. She conceived and realized the Museum’s first dedicated building, which opened on the Bowery in 2007, designed by leading architects SAANA who went on to win the Pritzker Prize. The Museum quickly became a catalyst for the transformation of the Bowery neighborhood, and inspired Phillips to found IDEAS CITY (2011) , an international program exploring the future of cities with culture as a driving force, as well as NEW INC (2014), the first museum-led incubator for art, technology, and design. She is currently leading a second expansion, with a building by OMA/Rem Koolhaas which will double the museum’s size. Prior to arriving at the New Museum, Phillips was a curator at the Whitney Museum for two decades, where she organized six biennial exhibitions, several landmark thematic exhibitions including “Image World: Art and Media Culture,” “Beat Culture and the New America,” and “The American Century: l950-2000,” as well as the first museum exhibitions of Richard Prince, Terry Winters, and Cindy Sherman. At the New Museum, Phillips has curated exhibitions of Carroll Dunham, Paul McCarthy, and John Waters, and most recently, organized a major survey of the work of Chris Burden.
Phillips has served on the boards of several organizations and foundations, including the American Association of Museum Directors, where she initiated a study on the gender compensation gap among its members.
Phillips has authored over thirty publications, has lectured extensively around the world, and has served as a visiting critic at Yale University. She was named a “Top 40 New Yorker” by New York Magazine as well as a “top 100 Business Women of the Year” by Crain’s, and Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business” and was recently profiled in the New York Times.
