David Elliott (born 1949) is a British-born art gallery and museum curator and writer about modern and contemporary art.
After studying history at the University of Durham, and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art Elliott worked as an exhibitions officer at the Arts Council of Great Britain, after which he served as director of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford from 1976 to 1996. Elliott's programme at Oxford included exhibitions of art from Latin America, Asia, South Africa, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Elliott was then Director of the Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art) in Stockholm from 1996 to 2001. From 1998 to 2004, he was President of CIMAM [the International Committee of ICOM for Museums of Modern and Contemporary Art]. In the 1990's, he curated a big exhibition 'Art and Power" exploring the relationship of Art with the totalitarian regimes in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The exhibition was shown in various museums across the world.
Between 2001 and 2006 Elliott was the director of Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, a large privately-endowed museum devoted to contemporary - particularly Asian - art, architecture and design. During 2007 he was the first Director of Istanbul Modern and in 2008 was Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor in the History of Art at the Humboldt University, Berlin and Guest Professor in Museum Studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. From 2008 to 2010, he was Artistic Director for the 17th Biennale of Sydney, 'THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age' which took place 12 May - 1 August 2010. In 2009, he delivered the Toshiba Lecture Series, 'Rethinking Art after the Age of "Enlightenment"', at the British Museum in London.
His exhibition 'Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between heaven and hell in contemporary Japanese art,' opened at Japan Society, New York in March 2011 and 'Between Heaven & Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia' is on show at Calvert 22 London until 12 November 2011. He is currently Artistic Director of the 1st Kiev International Biennial of Contemporary Art entitles 'The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art' that will open in May 2012 and is advising the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charitable Trust on the artistic development and programming of the Central Police Station Heritage site (CPS) in Hong Kong. Since 2010 he has been Chairman of the Board of the Triangle Art Network at Gasworks in London.
David Elliott has conceived or worked on exhibitions including: ‘Art and Power: Europe under the dictators 1933–1945’ (1995); ‘Wounds: between democracy and redemption in contemporary art’ (1998); ‘After the Wall: art and culture in post-Communist Europe’ (1999); ‘Organising Freedom: Nordic art in the ’90s’ (2000); ‘Tokyo Young Artists’ Video Initiative’ (2001); ‘Absences’ (2002); ‘Happiness: a survival guide for art and life’ (2003); ‘Africa Remix: the contemporary art of a continent’ (2004); ‘Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Where is Our Place?’ (2004); ‘Follow Me! Chinese Art at the Turn of the Millennium and Hiroshi Sugimoto’ (2005); ‘Tokyo Berlin/Berlin Tokyo, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin’ (2005); ‘Hatsu-yume [First Dream]: the video art of Bill Viola’ (2006); ‘From Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic: modernity at a time of change’ (2007); ‘Time Past, Time Present: 20 years of the Istanbul Biennial’ (2007); and ‘The Quick and the Dead: Rites of passage in art, spirit and life’ (2009). David Elliott appointed curator 'First International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Ukraine' (2012).