Artist CV

An artist CV is a record of your professional experiences and artistic achievements used to apply for juried exhibitions, grants, awards, gallery shows, commissions, and residency programs. As such, an artist CV is more detailed and much longer than a typical resume.

An artistic resume is much like a resume for other jobs. It’s brief and often angled towards your particular expertise to help you land a job in the commercial world. This also means it should be shorter—2-page resumes are standard for most candidates.

An artist CV is a document presenting an artist's background, skills, and accomplishments. It differs from a standard resume as it contains a list of artistic achievements and is therefore much more detailed and way longer.

Do you even need an artist resume or an artist CV?

Oh, very much so.

Whether you’re applying for exhibitions, residencies, grants, or art awards, selection committees will expect to see your art resume.

And in order to beat hundreds of other candidates, yours will have to be perfect.

The first person to read your artist CV could be an academic administrator with no real art expertise. That’s why you have to make sure your CV design is easy to follow and understandable even by a layperson. Here’s how:

• Start with good CV formatting. Use white space to improve readability and highlight each section of your CV. 
• For your CV font, go a simple sans serif like Calibri. It’s modern, readable, and renders on most systems.
• For the CV file format, use PDF. It won’t mess up your careful formatting. But, some employers and institutions will insist you don’t use PDF. Be prepared and save a copy of your artist CV in another format like DOCX.