gaoyuan 媛
EDUCATION
M.A. Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies, Columbia University in the City of New York
Honours B.A History of Art and Cinema Studies, University of Toronto (Full-Scholarship, High Distinction)
High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China (RDFZ)
BIO
gaoyuan (b. Beijing, China) is an art curator, experience designer, and cultural strategist based in New York. Her practice moves fluidly between art, music, and film, exploring poetics, relationalities, and spiritualities through tech-empowered immersive environments.
She has collaborated with museums and galleries across the US, Canada, and China. At Arsenal Contemporary New York, where she served as a full-time curator, she organized Theater of Energies (2024), an international group exhibition examining the transcultural concept of energy/qi in artistic milieux, which was named an Artforum Must See. Alongside the exhibition, she authored the experimental catalogue 3 A.M. Provocations: In Lieu of a Curatorial Statement. As an ArtTable Curatorial Fellow at the Bronx Museum, she contributed to an upcoming exhibition on non-Western mythologies and spiritualities, and as part of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi team, she advanced collection development and acquisitions research with a focus on the WANASA region. Earlier in her career, she worked with M Woods Museums in Beijing on five major exhibitions, including a large survey of Man Ray and a collaboration with the British Museum.
Yuan was a Casa Muraro Summer Fellow at the 59th Venice Biennale researching immersive environments in contemporary art, and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Jackman Humanities Institute in Toronto leading an interdisciplinary project on the Malcove Collection at the University of Toronto Art Museum.
She is the recipient of many academic awards and scholarships, including the Moriyama Gold Medal, Mary Coyne Rowell Jackman Graduate Scholarship, Lawrence and Sharon Ho International Scholarship, University of Toronto International Scholar Award, among others.
Her work has appeared in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Whitehot Magazine, Artefuse, Impulse Magazine, Screen, and Caméra Stylo.