Natalie Urquhart

Natalie Urquhart joined NGCI in 2004 and has been Director and Chief Curator since 2009. During her time as Director she has led the capital campaign and building project and has overseen the redevelopment of NGCIs infrastructure, enabling the organisation to double in scope and visitor traffic. She was responsible for spearheading NGCI’s Strategic Plan 2014-19, creating NGCI’s new business department, and significantly increasing the size of the National Art Collection and related educational resources. She has also worked to legitimize and enable arts careers in the Cayman Islands by introducing NGCI’s Creative Careers programme, mentoring students and emerging artists, and public speaking to inform and educate the community about creative workforce opportunities.

Natalie serves as a Board Member of the Museums Association of the Caribbean and a core committee member of Tilting Axis – a regional strategic alliance which works to further the development of infrastructure, production and markets for the Caribbean’s visual arts sector. She is founder and a co-director of Cayman Creative Alliance, a member of the Cayman Islands National Cultural Policy Steering Committee, where she represents the Visual Arts and Creative Industries sectors, a member of the Cayman Islands Constitutional Commission, a member of the Young Caymanian Speakers Bureau, and a past council member for the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce.

Early in her career, Natalie interned with the British Museum’s Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, working with their Caribbean collection, and at the Institute of International Visual Art (InIVA), London, before returning to the Cayman Islands to work as a curator for the Visual Arts Society and Arts Editor for Cayman Free Press’s (CFP) Special Publications department. At CFP she founded Inside Out magazine, the country’s first design and lifestyle publication. She began her tenure at NGCI as Education and Press Officer and later held the positions of Deputy Director and Chief Curator.

Natalie holds degrees in Art History (BA. Hons, University of Glasgow, 2000) and Arts Management (MA. Hons, University of London, 2006). She has seventeen years’ experience in the cultural sector coordinating multi-genre arts festivals, arts programming, and exhibitions for museums and heritage sites and in 2011 was presented with the Cayman Islands’ prestigious Young Caymanian Leadership Award. She has been awarded a National Arts and Culture Award Star of Creativity (2010), a National Heritage Cross (2016), and a Cayman Literary Award (2017) for her work in the cultural sector.

Her curatorial research explores the influence of traditional cultural heritage and memory on contemporary artistic practice in the Cayman Islands and wider region. This work has formed the basis of innovative exhibitions that bridge the historical and the contemporary. These include Native Sons – Fahive (2005), 21st Century Cayman (2010), The Persistence of Memory (2011), Tidal Shift (2015), and Upon the Seas (2017). She is the leading authority on Caymanian art and has published regular papers on the subject and well as the book Art of the Cayman Islands, the islands first formal art history (Scala Fine Art Publishers Ltd., Fall 2016).