Philip Tinari is Director and Chief Executive of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Since joining UCCA in 2011, he has led its growth and transformation from a founder-owned private establishment into China’s premier institution of modern and contemporary art, accredited across multiple locations.

At UCCA, Tinari has brought world-class exhibitions and programs to a broad audience, pursuing a vision of art as a bridge between China and the wider world. During his tenure, the museum has presented leading Chinese and international contemporary artists, including Matthew Barney, Cao Fei, Maurizio Cattelan, Gu Dexin, Lubaina Himid, William Kentridge, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Tuymans, Xu Bing, Haegue Yang, and Zeng Fanzhi, among more than one hundred others. His program has identified and cultivated emerging talents in addition to surveying historical figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol in the most comprehensive exhibitions of their work presented in China. Under Tinari’s leadership, UCCA has grown from a single venue into a constellation of four architecturally and programmatically distinct museums, including the flagship UCCA Beijing, UCCA Dune in Beidaihe, UCCA Edge in Shanghai, and UCCA Clay in Yixing. He has pioneered an operating model that merges a highly evolved network of individual donors and sponsors with an ambitious range of commercial projects to supplement traditional forms of revenue for the institution. 

Known for his curatorial work and expertise on Chinese contemporary art, Tinari was co-curator of the landmark exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (2017) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, and SFMOMA; and curator of the exhibition “Bentu, Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation”(2016) at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In 2021 he organized “Feeling the Stones,”the inaugural edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Riyadh, at that time the largest contemporary art exhibition to have taken place in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He is curator of the 2025 edition of the Verbier Art Summit, on the theme“Quarter Life Crisis: Art in a World on the Brink.”

From 2009 to 2012, Tinari was founding editor of LEAP, China's first international contemporary art magazine. Prior to that, he worked in Beijing as founding editor of the Chinese edition of Artforum, China representative for Art Basel, and lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Dushu. In 2015 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2016 he was a fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He holds degrees in East Asian Studies from Harvard University and literature and history from Duke University, and studied Chinese as a Fulbright scholar at Tsinghua University. Born near Philadelphia in 1979, he has lived and worked in Beijing since 2006.