How to Write an Artist CV That Galleries Actually Take Seriously

As editor-in-chief of ART UKRAINE, I reviewed exhibition submissions almost daily, and the artists who wrote to me would send portfolios, statements, and press kits all at once. The CV was always the first thing I looked at, not because it was the most interesting document in the package, but because it told me in about 30 seconds whether the person behind it was a professional. A clean, properly formatted CV meant the artist understood how the art world works, while a messy one warned me that I was probably about to read a messy statement and look at work that had been poorly documented.

The real problem is that nobody teaches artists how to write a CV, because art schools teach technique and theory, and sometimes even how to write a statement or a bio, but the CV itself, the single document that every gallery, grant committee, and residency program asks for, gets left entirely to guesswork.

An Artist CV Is Not a Resume

This is where most of the confusion starts, because a resume is a one-page summary of your work experience tailored for a specific job, while an artist CV is a comprehensive record of your professional activity as an artist. It is not tailored and it is not summarized, since the whole point is to give the full picture rather than a curated slice of it.

A resume gets shorter as you cut away the irrelevant experience, but an artist CV gets longer as your career grows, so a mid-career artist with 15 years of exhibitions might reasonably have a four-page CV, and an emerging artist might have a single page. Both of those are perfectly normal, and what actually matters is that every line on the page is real and verifiable.

The Sections, in Order

Gallery directors and curators expect a specific structure, and when you deviate from it, you signal that you have not done your homework on how the field actually works.

Contact information. Include your name, city of residence, email, and website, but skip the phone number unless you genuinely want it public, and never put your home address on the page.

Education. List the degrees that are relevant to your practice, such as an MFA, a BFA, or the workshops and residencies that included formal instruction, and give the institution, the degree, and the year for each one. If you are self-taught, skip this section entirely rather than writing "self-taught" as a line item, because it reads as an apology.

Solo exhibitions. Put the most recent first, with each entry giving the exhibition title (in italics if you want), the venue name, the city, and the year, and if the show traveled to multiple venues, list each one.

Group exhibitions. Use the same format here, and if the list is long, you can select the most significant entries and title the section "Selected group exhibitions," since curated shows carry far more weight than open calls.

Collections. Name the public and private collections that hold your work, where something like "Private collection, Berlin" is fine if the collector prefers anonymity, while museum collections should always be listed by their full name.

Awards, grants, residencies. Give the name of the award or program, the granting institution, and the year for each one.

Publications. Include the articles, catalog essays, books, or reviews that mention or feature your work, listing the author, title, publication, and year, and if you wrote the text yourself, say so. When someone else wrote about you, that carries a different kind of weight, because a review in a recognized publication is worth more than a self-published catalog, and the reader always knows the difference.

What to Leave Out

This section matters even more than the one above it, because knowing what to leave off is where most artists go wrong.

Job experience. Unless the job is directly relevant to your artistic practice, such as teaching at an art school or holding an artist-in-residence position somewhere, it does not belong on an artist CV, and your years as a graphic designer or a barista are part of your life story rather than your exhibition record.

Skills and software. This is a resume category that has no place on a CV, since a line like "Proficient in Photoshop" sits awkwardly next to your exhibition at ARCO Madrid.

Objectives or personal statements. Your artist statement is a separate document, so do not paste it at the top of your CV, because the CV is built from facts while the statement is built from meaning, and mixing the two weakens both of them.

Every group show you have ever been in. Once your list passes 20 group shows, you need to start selecting, because an open call at a community center and a curated show at a national museum are not equivalent, and you should choose the ones that actually reflect your professional level.

Formatting

Keep the whole thing simple and clean, set in one font with no colors, no graphics, and no headshot, because the CV is a reference document and not a brochure.

Use consistent formatting for dates and locations, so that if you write "New York, 2024" for one entry, you never switch to "2024, New York" for the next. This sounds trivial, but I can tell you from years of reading CVs that inconsistency in formatting is one of the first things a trained eye catches, and it creates an impression of carelessness that bleeds into how the reader perceives your work.

Always send the file as a PDF, because a Word document signals that you do not care how it looks when someone else opens it on a different machine.

The One-Page Question

Emerging artists often worry that their CV is too short, and a single page with three group shows and a BFA really does feel thin, but padding it out with irrelevant entries only makes it worse rather than better.

If your CV is short, the answer is to make every line count, because one strong solo show at a respected space is worth more than ten group shows at student galleries, and one published review of your work is worth more than five self-organized exhibitions. Build your CV the same way you build your practice, with intention rather than volume.

I once interviewed painter Alena Kuznetsova for ART UKRAINE, an artist whose entire practice revolved around a single concept, the idea that change is the foundation of painting, and although her CV was not long, every entry on it was deliberate and connected to that central idea. That coherence said more about her professionalism than any list of 50 shows ever could.

When to Update

Update it after every exhibition, publication, or award, rather than once a year or only when you need it for a submission, because the worst possible time to update your CV is the night before a deadline, when you are trying to remember the exact title of a group show from three years ago.

Keep a running document and add entries as they happen, so that you format it properly once and then simply maintain it from there, which means that when a gallery asks for your CV on short notice, and they will, you will already have it ready to send.

If you need help putting your CV, bio, or statement together, see my artist text services, since I have read hundreds of artist CVs and written professional materials for artists at every stage of their careers.