Curatorial - Expression of Interest

Mona is seeking expressions of interest from curators considering a career move to Tasmania. We are looking for outstanding candidates with proven curatorial experience in Australian institutions or major visual art businesses.

Please don’t express your interest unless you have completed a degree in Art History or Curatorial Studies, or have substantial comparable experience working within the field.

We are interested in people with knowledge of exhibition making, collections, acquisitions and the art market. You don’t necessarily need strength across all of these areas, but substantial experience in one or more will be appealing. We want people who are comfortable making exhibitions with living artists, thinking critically about how collections are presented, assessing potential acquisitions, and researching the provenance and significance of a work by a dead artist. If you can move confidently between several of these things, please write to us. Jargon-free writing skills will also be considered a favourable attribute.

We want people with enough experience to understand the demands of a full-time curatorial role: periods when the distinction between work and life becomes fairly theoretical; working for a fortnight straight while moving between installations, artist dinners and events; or knowing how to talk to 150 people in an evening—though preferably not all at once.

We want people who can be front-facing spokespeople for the organisation: comfortable talking about art, artists, exhibitions and Mona with everyone from a visiting artist to a journalist, collector, lender or room full of strangers.

Mona is a private museum, and that shapes how we work. We choose which institutional conventions are useful to us and which are not. We value the rules that help make us a museum; we have less interest in habits that can only be justified by saying, ‘that’s how it’s done’.

At this stage, we are seeking to understand who in Australia might be looking for a change of pace, geography or institutional culture.

This is not an advertisement for a specific position ready to be filled, so please don’t write asking for a position description, salary range or start date. We are considering how to build the capacity of Mona’s curatorial team over the coming period, and we want to hear from you if the above sounds like you.

Please send us a one-page A4 letter expressing your interest. Tell us briefly about your background, what you are good at, and why you want to move to Hobart to work at Mona. We won’t penalise you for using AI to help write it. We may penalise you if you don’t use it well.

Email your letter as a PDF only—one page, no images, addressed to Jarrod Rawlins—to employment@mona.net.au with the subject line: Curatorial EOI Mona.

(Please follow these instructions to ensure your letter is read.)