Tate Britain, the London museum dedicated to British art, named Penelope Curtis, curator of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, as its director.

Curtis, 48, replaces Stephen Deuchar, who will lead the Art Fund, a U.K. charity that raises money to buy art for the national collections, Tate said in an e-mailed press release. Curtis was the first exhibitions curator at Tate Liverpool when it opened in 1988, and joined Leeds Museums and Galleries in 1994 to head the Henry Moore Centre for sculpture study, helping turn it into the Henry Moore Institute.

“Penelope Curtis has made an outstanding contribution to the study of sculpture and especially to our understanding of British sculpture in the 20th century,” Tate Director Nicholas Serota said in an e-mailed press release. “I am delighted that she will bring her scholarship and original vision to the presentation of British art at Tate Britain.”

Ever since Tate Modern opened in 2000, the nation’s British art collections have been housed inside the old Tate Gallery building on the banks of the Thames and renamed Tate Britain. Deuchar was Tate Britain’s founding director, and has been at Tate for 11 years.

Curtis starts in April 2010.