The Whitney Museum, New York, has appointed Soyoung Yoon as director of its Independent Study Program (ISP).
The nomination comes one year after the suspension of the ISP following the dismissal of associate director Sara Nadal-Melsió amid controversy surrounding the Whitney Museum’s cancellation of a performance organised by the 2024–25 ISP cohort.
Yoon holds is associate professor of art history and visual studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, New York. Prior to joining the ISP as director, she held several leadership roles at the New School, including director of the Fine Arts MFA Program at Parsons School of Design and director of the Visual Studies Program at Lang. Yoon was a member of the 2006–07 ISP cohort and returned to the program as a faculty member from 2012 to 2023.
‘I first encountered the ISP as an ideal for theory in practice, as a mode of study as well as politics and ethics, through my activism in the student movements in Seoul. The ISP continues to be a community for those who are not quite at home in their institutions, disciplines, and practices, for those who question the methodologies, the discourses, the habitus, the social worlds of such practices, and thereby effect changes, become leaders, new legends, teachers for those to come,’ said Yoon in a statement. ‘In continuity with this history, I am honored and thrilled to helm the Program that speaks to, strengthens, and champions new desires that find their emergent form in the desire to be an artist. For much is demanded of our imagination today: we must meet that demand.’
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