How to Write an Artist CV: What to Include, How to Format Entries and Which Exhibitions to List

An artist CV is a professional résumé that brings together the verifiable record of an artist’s career: education, exhibitions, residencies, awards, publications. Together with the biography, the artist statement and the portfolio, it forms the package of documents that no application can do without today, whether to a gallery, an open call, a grant or a residency.

This is often where the difficulties begin. Some artists don’t see how a CV differs from a biography and repeat the same text in two places. Some hesitate to list an exhibition in a small space because it doesn’t seem serious enough. Others, on the contrary, list everything indiscriminately, and the document becomes hard to read. All of this can be solved once you understand the logic of the document.

Let’s take it step by step: what a CV is for, which sections it is built from, how each line is formatted, what counts as a publication, and which mistakes most often undermine trust in what is otherwise a strong CV.

Contents

• The CV in your application package: how it differs from a biography and a statement
• CV sections: what goes in and in what order
• Entry format: how to write exhibition lines
• Publications: what counts and how to list it
• Mistakes: what undermines trust in a CV

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The CV in your application package: how it differs from a biography and a statement

The three texts in the package do three different jobs, and it is best not to confuse them.

The biography is a short, continuous paragraph in the third person: year and place of birth, education, where you live and work. It reads as an introduction to the person. What is expected of the works themselves is covered in the article on the artist’s portfolio.

The artist statement is a text about your artistic position: themes, method, mediums. It explains what your art is about.

The CV is a factual list of achievements in reverse chronological order. No descriptions, judgements or adjectives: just the year, the event, the place. It is a document that gets checked, not one that is read for pleasure.

The job of the package as a whole is to speak about you in a structured, to-the-point way when you are not there. A gallerist may look through an application on the go, between meetings, so the file has to open straight away and be readable in minutes. A lyrical story of ten thousand characters works against its author here.

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CV sections: what goes in and in what order

The standard structure looks like this, and it is not worth departing from it without a reason, because people read the document according to a familiar pattern.

• Header. First and last name, year of birth, city, contact details, website and profiles.
• Education. Art education, and education in another field if it relates to your practice. Courses and schools are listed if they are recognised programmes, not just any webinar you happened to attend.
• Solo exhibitions. In a section of their own, even if there is only one.
• Group exhibitions. If there are many, the heading becomes “Selected group exhibitions” and only the most significant ones stay.
• Residencies. With the venue and the city.
• Art fairs. The name of the fair, the year, and the gallery or collective you took part with.
• Awards and grants. Including shortlists: being shortlisted is a result too.
• Publications. Texts about you and texts of your own.
• Collections. Museum and corporate collections, if your work has entered them. Private collections are listed without the owners’ names.

Empty sections are simply left out. A one-page CV with five honest lines is more convincing than one padded out to three pages with formalities.

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Entry format: how to write exhibition lines

Everything goes in reverse order: from the present back to the past. Recent events come first, because they are the ones that show where you are now.

An exhibition line is built on a single template: year — title in quotation marks — venue — city — curator. For example: “2023. ‘Personal Myth’, ArtDom Gallery, Moscow. Curator: Irina Sokolova”. The curator is named if there was one: this is information that matters in the art world.

What to do with an exhibition in an unconventional place. A project shown in a studio, an apartment, a courtyard or on the street is listed as an off-site project. It is a normal format with a name of its own, and there is no need to hide it. If the space was your own, you can give it a working name, as many artist-run initiatives do.

Consistency matters more than completeness. If one line has a curator and another does not, if the city is given in some places and not in others, the document looks as if it was put together in a hurry. Better to have fewer fields, but the same ones in every line.

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Publications: what counts and how to list it

Artists tend to underestimate the publications section, even though it shows that you are no longer the only one talking about your work.

What counts. Anything that documents your practice in someone else’s publication: reviews and round-ups, interviews with you, expert features that include your commentary, exhibition announcements in the media, catalogues and printed publications, curators’ texts about your projects, and your own articles and essays on art.

How to list it. Year, author, title of the piece, publication. In the digital version of the document, the link can be given separately. Reverse chronology applies here too.

The point of the section is simple: it gives a fuller picture of your practice than a list of exhibitions does. Texts show which conversation you are already part of and how your art is read from the outside.

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Mistakes: what undermines trust in a CV

• Mixing genres. Descriptions of works, adjectives and reflections do not belong in a CV — that is what the statement is for.
• Inconsistent formatting. Different line templates within one document read as carelessness.
• Embellishment. A group exhibition passed off as a solo show, or an art fair you never took part in, can be checked in five minutes, and it closes doors for a long time.
• Listing everything. Every workshop and every makers’ market on the list dilutes the lines that carry weight.
• Decorative design. Coloured blocks, unusual fonts and columns make it harder to find things quickly. A CV has to be easy to skim.
• An out-of-date file. A CV is updated after every significant event, not an hour before you submit.
• One document for every occasion. For a gallery, a grant and a residency the emphasis falls differently, and the order of the sections can change.

One last thing worth remembering: a short CV is not a verdict. At the start, everyone’s is short. What matters far more is that every line in it is honest, consistently formatted and shows movement.

Open your CV and look at the first three lines: what do they say about where you are right now?