Maria Balshaw, the director of Tate, will step down in the new year after nine years at the helm, the museum announced Friday.

Appointed in 2017, Balshaw was the first woman to lead the institutional network, which includes some of the world’s most visited museums, including the Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Her tenure was marked by a substantial diversification of Tate’s collection and programming to spotlight new art forms as well as indigenous artists and artists from the Global South. Balshaw also oversaw the launch of a landmark £150 million ($200 million) endowment fund for Tate Modern in an effort to address the museum’s mounting financial woes and secure its future long-term.

“With a growing and increasingly diverse audience, and with a brilliant forward plan in place, I feel now is the right time to pass on the baton,” Balshaw said in a statement to press.

“Maria has been a trailblazer at Tate,” Roland Rudd, Tate’s chair of trustees, said. “She has never wavered from her core belief—that more people deserve to experience the full richness of art, and more artists deserve to be part of that story.”

Balshaw’s greatest legacy at Tate will surely be her influential exhibition programming, which has consistently brought historically overlooked art into a world-class institutional setting. Memorable shows from recent years include an expansive introduction to long-maligned, pre-internet digital artists, a landmark survey of modern art in Nigeria, and a posthumous retrospective for the queer performance artist and provocateur Leigh Bowery. Other important shows were dedicated to Isaac Julien, Yoko Ono, and Emily Kam Kngwarray.

Despite these wins, Tate has faced its fair share of challenges since 2017. This year, it reported a 27 percent drop in attendance since 2019, with Balshaw suggesting that the combined forces of Brexit and the pandemic may have discouraged young Europeans aged 16–24 from visiting the U.K. capital.

People come and go via Tate Modern turbine hall entrance to the gallery of contemporary art in London. Photo: Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images.

The museum also faces a serious funding deficit, which stood at nearly £9 million ($12 million) in 2023. Earlier this year, Tate laid off 7 percent of its staff, while last month, some staff went on a seven-day strike over low pay. The last strike at the Tate was in 2020 in opposition to announced plans to layoff 313 workers. It lasted 42 days.

Balshaw was among a growing number of U.K. museum directors to adopt U.S.-style approaches to philanthropy in order to stay afloat amid successive government spending cuts. In June, it launched the Tate Future Fund, with the aim of raising £150 million ($200 million) by 2030 as an endowment fund to secure Tate Modern’s future long-term. To this end, Tate Modern raised more than £43 million ($58 million) through a star-studded fundraising gala in celebration of the museum’s 25th anniversary. By the end of the year, the museum has raised over £50 million ($67 million).

At Tate Britain, meanwhile, Balshaw was involved in organizing the new Clore Garden, which will open to the public in 2026.

Tate’s membership program has also expanded to 150,000 members under Balshaw’s leadership. Tate Collective, an initiative that she launched in 2018, has swelled to include 180,000 16 to 15-year-olds.

Prior to joining Tate in 2017, Balshaw was director of the Whitworth (University of Manchester) and Manchester City Galleries, a role she had held since 2006. Since joining Tate, she has also served as chair of the National Museum Directors Council.