Phillip was on the organising committees for The Age of Chivalry exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1987 and Gothic: Art for England 1400-1547 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2003. He has also been the curator for a number of exhibitions, most notably Image and Idol at Tate Britain, co-curated with the sculptor Richard Deacon in 2001-2, Thetford’s Lost Tudor Sculptures (with Prof. Ross Parry) at the Ancient House Museum, Thetford in 2013-14 and Richard Deacon: This is where ideas come from, at Wolfson College, Cambridge 2015. Curatorial work has become an increasing focus of his attention: at Wolfson, he recently curated Jonathan Meuli: Approaches to Abstraction in 2019; The Frangenberg Donation in 2020; and Amikam Toren: Representation as a Matter of Fact, in 2021. At Loughborough, he curated Drawing Together in 2020, in the Martin Hall gallery, an exhibition which brought world-class drawings by artists such as Richard Deacon, Elizabeth Price, Simon Patterson and Soheila Sokhanvari to Loughborough for students to study.

In 2011 he was the UK representative in History of Art for the EU ‘Tuning’ Project, Sectoral Qualifications Framework and in 2015 was a member of the Heritage Science team at the Smithsonian, Washington, USA. In 2018/19, Phillip secured the donation of one of the finest private collections of conceptual art in the country [c.700 works] to Wolfson College, Cambridge, through the gift of Dr Thomas Frangenberg’s executors. Without an art gallery of its own, Wolfson houses its exhibitions in a central space, the Combination Room, where every member of college will see it. Exhibitions are also accessible to visitors at weekends.