Tara McDowell is Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include contemporary curating, exhibition histories, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, and the various support structures of art, including home, school, exhibition, labour, and friendship. She is a founding member of Climate Aware Creative Practices, an Australia-wide alliance of creative arts educators, researchers, and practitioners working together to deepen engagement with the challenges posed by climate change.

Selected curatorial projects include Take Hold of the Clouds, with Fleur Watson (2022); the experimental symposium Shapeshifters: New Forms of Curatorial Research (2019); John Baldessari: Wall Painting (2017 and 2019); 124,908, for the 2nd Tbilisi Triennial, Georgia (2015); Nothing Beside Remains (2014); and The Land Grant: Flatbread Society with Amy Franceschini (2014). She publishes and lectures frequently, and her writing has appeared in art-agenda, Artforum, Artlink, Discipline, Filip, The Lifted Brow, Memo Review, The Miami Rail, Mousse, un Magazine, and The Exhibitionist, a journal on curatorial practice for which she was Founding Senior Editor. She has written exhibition catalogue essays on Zarouhie Abdalian, Sarah Cain, Barbara Cleveland, Fiona Connor, Wangechi Mutu, David Park, Jahnne Pasco-White, and Richard Tuttle, among many others. McDowell has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where she mounted many solo and group exhibitions, including projects on Minimalism, Fluxus, assemblage, and avant-garde cinema.

McDowell holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her recent books include The Artist As (Sternberg Press, 2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019), which argued for domestic space as a site of creative production in the work of the artist Jess and poet Robert Duncan. The book was awarded the 2018 CAA Millard Meiss Publication Fund Award and was reviewed in seven national and international publications, including Bookforum, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and The New York Review of Books. Her current book project, The Mother Artist, was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Henry Moore Foundation Research Grant (both in 2023). McDowell currently leads the Australia Research Council project Care and Repair: Rethinking Contemporary Curation for Conditions of Crisis.