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NYU President Linda G. Mills and Provost Georgina Dopico have announced the appointment of Joan Kee as the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the New York University Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), effective August 19, 2024.
A respected scholar of modern and contemporary art of Asia and the United States, Kee is a professor of the history of art at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and holds a law degree from Harvard and a PhD from the IFA.
As director of the Institute, housed in the landmarked Duke Mansion, she will lead one of the world’s most respected graduate schools and research centers in art history, archaeology, and art conservation, and one that has produced many of the nation’s top art historians, museum directors, curators, and conservators since its founding in 1932.
“In a field of wonderful candidates, Joan Kee distinguished herself through her remarkably expansive vision of art history and her ideas for productive, innovative, and interdisciplinary collaboration in art history across NYU,” said President Mills. “I am impressed by her ability to build bridges and support collaboration in art history across NYU, including with Arts and Science’s Department of Art History; her scholarly achievements; her views on how the Institute can shape the next generation of art historians; and her genuine love and appreciation for the IFA.”
Kee’s research focuses on art and the law, comparative diaspora studies, and art and digital communications. Recognized by the New Yorker and the Nation for sparking global interest in Korean abstraction, particularly in the movement known as Tansaekhwa from the 1970s and 1980s, she is the author of Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), which was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Her second book, Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (2019), draws from her legal practice and training, and her expertise has been sought by major news organizations on various aspects of art, ethics, and law. Her most recent book, The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity, focuses on Black and Asian artistic intersections. It won the 2024 Robert Motherwell Book Award.
Kee earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (magna cum laude) in the history of art from Yale University in 1997 and a JD from Harvard Law School in 2000. She worked at Hughes Hubbard and Reed and then at Simpson Thatcher and Bartlett. After earning a PhD from the IFA in 2008, she joined the faculty of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor as an assistant professor in the history of art; she was appointed full professor in 2019.
Among many other honors, she was the Inaugural Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art from 2022 to 2023 and has received fellowships from the Clark Art Institute, the Tate Research Institute, the Kress Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She has served as chair of the Board of Advisors for the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and as a member of the Arts and Culture Committee of the Asia Society’s Global Board of Trustees. She is also a contributing editor of Artforum and editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail.
“It is a tremendous privilege to return to the IFA, a truly vigorous intergenerational art community that has opened up many vibrant worlds,” Kee said. “It is a further privilege still to join the IFA and its many exciting possibilities of collaboration and engagement with NYU, New York City, and the world.”
About the Institute of Fine Arts
Founded in 1932, the Institute of Fine Arts is a center of graduate training and research in art history, archaeology, and conservation. The Institute has a permanent faculty unrivaled in the breadth and depth of its expertise and unparalleled in the range of its adjunct lecturers from top museums, research institutes, and conservation studios. The Institute has conferred more than 1600 degrees, and its alumni hold leadership roles as professors, curators, museum directors, archaeologists, conservators, critics, and institutional administrators throughout the U.S. and internationally.
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