Charles Merewether was born in Edinburgh. He received his PhD after studying literature, philosophy and art history in Australia. He subsequently taught European modernism art the University of Sydney before leaving to live in Colombia and then Mexico. He taught at Universidad Iberoeramericana, then at the Universidad Autonoma in Barcelona. In 1991 he moved to New York and received a research fellowship from Yale University and worked as the Inaugural Curator for the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico (MARCO) between 1991-1994. Subsequently he was a Curator at the Research Institute at the Getty Center in Los Angles for (1994-2003) and gave courses at the University of Southern California (USC). He was Artistic Director of the Sydney Biennale between 2004-2006. Between 2007-8, he was Deputy Director of the Cultural District, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi and from 2010-2013, Merewether was Director of the Institute of Contemporary arts, Singapore. He is currently Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Apart from essays and articles, his recent book publications include the recently published monograph After Memory: The Art of Milenko Prvacki, 40 Years, Editor, ISSUE: Land, (2012), and ISSUE: Echo (2013), a co-edited volume of essays After the Event, by Manchester University Press (2010). In recent years he was author of Under Construction: Ai Weiwei (2008) and editor of both Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970, (2007) and The Archive (2006). He is currently editing and co-writing a book, Singapore Art Today and another on contemporary art in Kazakhstan.