Rowena began curating at Flora Fairbairn Projects, where she scouted emerging artists and organised shows in temporary spaces of architectural interest. She then assisted the exhibitions team at the Whitechapel Gallery, where she supported a major survey and publication on Sophie Calle.
As an independent curator, Rowena has mounted solo exhibitions for Jakub Julian Ziolkowski (2017), Piers Jackson (2018), Alice Anderson (2018) and Sally Webber (2018). Group exhibitions that she has curated include: In Two Minds (2009), housed in a Huguenot townhouse in Spitalfields and supported by Arts Council England; Swan Song (2010), a one-night exhibition that occupied the spaces of a 19th century building in Soho pre-demolition; The Blue Hour, which opened in a former cricket club in Marylebone during Frieze in 2016 and Beyond, which opened in a former builders’ merchant in Latimer Road in 2017.
Artists that Rowena has included in group exhibitions include Henry Krokatsis, Nathaniel Rackowe, Hiraki Sawa, Yukako Shibata, David Spero, Philippe Vandenberg, Nick Waplington, Douglas White and David Zink Yi. Rowena was scheduled to bring Terence Koh’s bee chapel installation to London in the summer of 2020 and hopes that this project may be realised in the future.