How-to guide

How to build an art CV that opens doors

A working artist CV done right — the categories, order, formatting, and edge cases (no exhibitions yet, multidisciplinary practice, restarts) that come up most often.

1. Step 1

   Set the structure: nine sections in this order

   Art CVs have a stable conventional structure that panels read in roughly the same order across programs. Following the convention removes friction; deviating from it without strong reason produces a CV that panels have to translate, which costs you their attention. The standard section order, from top to bottom: Name and contact info (one line). Education (degrees only, with year, institution, and degree). Solo exhibitions (reverse chronological, year-title-venue-city). Group exhibitions (reverse chronological, same format). Residencies and fellowships. Awards, grants, and prizes. Publications and press. Public collections (if any pieces are held by museums or institutions). Teaching, lectures, and visiting positions. Some CVs also include "Curatorial Projects" or "Collaborations" — add these only if you have at least three entries in the category. A category with one entry reads as padding. Within each section, list items in reverse chronological order. The most recent thing is at the top, the oldest at the bottom. This matters because panels read CVs from top to bottom and the first thing they see in each section is the most current evidence of that activity. A CV with a 2026 solo show at the top of the solo section signals a current practice; the same CV listing the 2018 show first would read as a momentum problem. Do not include "Skills," "References," "Languages" (unless directly relevant to a specific program), "Hobbies," or any of the categories that come from job-résumé conventions. The art CV is not a job résumé; including these categories signals that you have confused the documents. The closest exception is "Languages" when applying to programs where multilingual practice is relevant (DAAD, programs in non-English-speaking countries, translation-focused residencies). When in doubt, leave it out.

2. Step 2

   Format each entry consistently with a single-line standard

   Every CV entry should fit on one line at standard text size. If an entry spills to a second line, you have included too much detail. The one-line discipline is what makes the CV scannable; panels move fast through CVs, and multi-line entries break the scan. The standard format per entry: Year. Exhibition Title (italicized), Venue, City. So a solo exhibition entry reads: "2026. Hours, Galerie Maximilian, Berlin." A group exhibition reads: "2025. Group exhibition title, Venue, City, curated by Curator Name (only if known)." A residency entry reads: "2024. Residency name, Institution, Country." Italicize exhibition titles (this is convention; do not bold or underline them). Use plain text for venues and cities. Use a period or comma as the separator — the comma is more compact and slightly more readable, but the period is also acceptable. Pick one separator style and use it consistently across all entries; mixed separators look careless. For grants and awards, include the amount only if the grant is named and the amount is significant for context. "2024. Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, $25,000" is appropriate because Pollock-Krasner is a known funder and the amount signals real funding. "2024. Local arts grant, $500" is not — the venue is not well-known and the amount is small, so it reads as padding. When in doubt about whether to include the amount, ask: would a panelist outside your immediate region recognize this grant? If yes, include the amount. If no, just include the name. For publications, format as: Year. "Article Title." Publication, Volume (if applicable), Page Range (if applicable), or URL (if online). A book review entry reads: "2024. "Review of Hours." Frieze, Issue 234, p. 142." An online piece reads: "2024. "Studio Conversation." Hyperallergic, 14 March 2024."

3. Step 3

   Keep Education brief and honest

   Education is the first section panels look at and one of the most often over-decorated. Keep it factual and short. Format each degree on one line: "Year of graduation. Degree, Institution, City (Country if outside your home region)." A typical education section for a working artist has 1–3 entries: MFA from a named program, BFA from somewhere, sometimes a workshop or fellowship that was substantial enough to warrant inclusion. Do not list every workshop you have attended, every continuing-education course, every short summer program. Limit to actual degrees and 1–2 multi-month fellowships of clear pedagogical weight (Skowhegan, Vermont Studio Center, Akademie Schloss Solitude — these are residencies that double as schools). A CV with a six-line Education section reads as resume padding. If you are self-taught or did not complete a formal art education, include the most relevant education you have ("BA, Philosophy, University Name, 2018"), and lean on the rest of the CV to demonstrate practice. Some of the strongest artist CVs have no MFA on them; the panel reads the exhibitions section and decides based on that. Do not include high school. Do not include incomplete degrees unless you have a strong reason and are willing to explain. Do not include honors or GPA — these are job-résumé conventions and read as off-key on an art CV. If you graduated with significant honors (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa for academic background), they can go in a one-line note: "BFA, Painting, RISD, 2018 (Honors)." Anything more granular is too much. Pay attention to ordering within Education. List most recent first. If you have an MFA and a BFA, the MFA is at the top. If you have an MFA in progress, you can include it as "MFA in progress, expected 2027, Institution, City" — but only if your program has formally enrolled you and you are at least one semester in.

4. Step 4

   Split Solo and Group exhibitions correctly

   Exhibitions are the heart of the CV. Most panels read this section first after Education. Get the categorization right and the section order is intuitive; get it wrong and panels lose confidence in the whole CV. A solo exhibition is one where the show is entirely your work — your name on the door, your work filling the space, your title and statement. Two-person shows, where two artists share equal billing, are sometimes called "Two-person Exhibitions" in their own subsection if you have three or more; otherwise they go in Group Exhibitions with a notation. Three-or-more-person shows are Group Exhibitions, full stop, even if you took up half the space. The temptation is to inflate. A group show where you exhibited two pieces alongside ten other artists is not a solo exhibition no matter how prominent your work was. Listing it as solo will be caught by any panelist who looks the venue up — and they often do. Misrepresenting exhibition types is one of the fastest ways to lose a panel's trust on an otherwise strong CV. If you have very few solo exhibitions, that is okay. A working artist with five years of practice typically has 1–3 solo shows. Listing them honestly produces a credible CV; padding by relabeling group shows produces a CV that breaks under scrutiny. If the Solo section is genuinely thin, lean on the Group section, residencies, and awards to fill out the page. The "Selected" qualifier. Some artists label sections "Selected Solo Exhibitions" and "Selected Group Exhibitions" to imply they are showing a curated subset. This is appropriate only when you have so many exhibitions that listing them all would run pages — typically mid-to-late-career artists. Early- and mid-career artists should simply list everything; using "Selected" when you have only six total exhibitions reads as pretension.

5. Step 5

   Handle the Residencies, Awards, and Publications sections with care

   These three sections are where panels look for signals about the institutional weight of your practice — which programs have invested in you, which funders have backed you, which publications have noticed you. Each section is short for most artists, and each one matters disproportionately. For Residencies and Fellowships, include both fully funded and partially funded residencies. Do not include self-funded artist retreats or working trips. Format: "Year. Residency Name, Institution, City." If the residency is well-known (MacDowell, Yaddo, DAAD, Rijksakademie, Skowhegan), the name alone carries weight; you don't need to explain it. If it's regional or less known, you can add a brief parenthetical: "Year. Residency name, Institution, City (year-long research fellowship in painting)." Keep parentheticals to under 8 words. For Awards, Grants, and Prizes, include only awards from named institutions where the application was competitive. A juried prize you won. A grant from a foundation. A fellowship from a state arts council. Do not include awards from your own school (a graduating student award is education, not a professional award) unless the award is well-known. Format the amount only if the funder is known nationally or internationally; small local grants with the amount listed read as padding. For Publications and Press, include both your own writing (essays, catalog texts) and writing about your work (reviews, profiles, mentions in critical writing). Group them under one heading if you have only a few of each; split into "Writing by" and "Writing about" subsections if you have substantial volume in each. Include the URL for online pieces; panels will sometimes click through to read the actual coverage. These three sections are also where the temptation to pad is highest. An artist with three exhibitions but a long awards section often padded — listed every minor scholarship, every honorable mention, every group-show invitation. Panels notice. A short, honest section beats a long padded one every time.

6. Step 6

   Use Teaching, Lectures, and Public Collections strategically

   These three sections often go at the bottom of the CV and are easy to neglect. Done right, they signal range and recognition that the exhibition history alone may not convey. Teaching: include positions where you taught or guest-taught in a structured context. Visiting artist talks, semester-long teaching positions, workshops you led at named institutions. Do not include teaching at your own MFA program while you were a student (that's part of your MFA, not professional teaching). Format: "Year(s). Position, Institution, City." A typical line: "2024. Visiting Artist Lecturer, RISD Graduate Painting, Providence, RI." A multi-year position runs: "2022–2024. Adjunct Faculty, Sculpture, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY." Lectures and Public Talks: include talks given at named institutions, conferences, or museums. Do not include casual studio visits or informal conversations. A typical line: "2024. Artist Talk: 'On Duration,' Whitney ISP, New York." Keep the talk title short; long titles cluttered with subtitles look academic. Public Collections: if any of your work is held in a named institutional collection — a museum, a university art collection, a corporate collection that is publicly documented — list it. Format: "Institution Name, City." This section is rare for early- and mid-career artists; if you don't have entries, leave the section out entirely rather than include private collections (which are not standard to list). These three sections together typically run 3–8 lines for most working artists. If you have none of them, the CV ends at Publications and that is fine — there is no convention requiring an artist to have teaching experience or public collections.

7. Step 7

   Export, name, and version the CV as a PDF

   Once the content is finalized, format it cleanly and export to PDF. A few formatting rules that work across most contexts: Font: a clean sans-serif (Helvetica, Arial, Inter) or a clean serif (Garamond, Times) at 10–11 point for body text, 14–16 point for the name at the top, 11–12 point for section headers. Avoid display fonts. Avoid italics anywhere except exhibition titles. Avoid bold anywhere except section headers and your name. The CV should look like a document, not a design exercise. Margins: 0.75 to 1 inch on all sides. Single-spaced text with extra space between sections (8–12 points). The whole document should fit on one to three pages for most artists; a CV longer than three pages signals either a late-career practice or a padding problem. Filename: name the PDF in a way that the panel can find it later in their downloads folder. "FirstName_LastName_CV_2026.pdf" is the convention. "CV.pdf" or "Resume Final v3.pdf" looks careless and gets buried. Version the file in your local archive: keep a master copy as "FirstName_LastName_CV_2026Q2_master.docx" or similar, with the quarter and year in the filename. When you update the CV, save as a new version rather than overwriting. This produces a trail of how the CV grew over time, which is useful when you need to reconstruct your activity for a survey or grant report. Read the PDF once in the actual format before sending. Sometimes formatting that looked fine in the editor breaks in PDF export — italicized titles drop to plain text, section spacing tightens, dates wrap to a second line. Catch these in the export, not in the panel's review.

8. Step 8

   Handle the early-career and restart cases honestly

   If you are early in your career and your CV is genuinely thin, do not pad it. Pad-detection is one of the things panels are most attuned to, and a thin honest CV is read as honest while a padded thin CV is read as deceptive. For early-career CVs (under three years of practice), the structure is: Education, Exhibitions (combined Solo and Group is fine when you have fewer than five total), Awards/Grants if any, Publications/Press if any, Teaching/Lectures if any. Skip empty sections rather than including them with no entries. The CV may be one page or even half a page, and that is fine. Panels reading early-career applications expect short CVs. Strategies for strengthening a thin CV honestly. Apply to juried open calls and group shows aggressively in your first three years; the exhibitions accumulate and they all count. Pitch your own talks to local institutions (university galleries, artist-run spaces, libraries) and accept invitations — a few talks build the Lectures section. Self-publish on a serious platform (Substack, Are.na, a curated blog) and treat that as legitimate writing — list it under Publications with the URL. Sit on panels and juries when invited and list those. For artists restarting practice after a break (parenthood, illness, a non-art career), the CV often has a gap. Address it briefly if you can — a single line at the top of Exhibitions: "Exhibition history reflects active practice 2014–2019 and 2024–present." Panels appreciate the context and read the gap less critically. The work and the recent entries do the rest. For mid-career artists doing a major shift in practice — moving from painting to sculpture, from gallery work to social practice — the CV stays unified. Do not split into "Old Practice" and "New Practice" sections. The exhibitions are still exhibitions whether they showed paintings or videos. The unified CV signals a coherent professional life with evolving content.