Whitney Names New Director of Independent Study Program
Soyoung Yoon’s appointment comes after the museum canceled a Palestine-related performance and suspended the program for a year.
Soyoung Yoon, the new director of the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program (photo Bryan Derballa, courtesy the Whitney)The Whitney Museum of American Art has appointed Soyoung Yoon as the new director of its Independent Study Program (ISP) following a year-long suspension of the fellowship. Yoon enters the role a year after the museum terminated the ISP's former associate director, Sara Nadal-Melsió, in the fallout of the abrupt cancellation of a Palestine-related performance curated by members of the 2024–25 ISP cohort. A regular visiting faculty member for the program, Yoon was a Critical Studies fellow in the 2006–07 ISP cohort and taught film and media studies at Purchase College while completing a PhD in art history at Stanford University.
She shifted to the New School in 2013, simultaneously reintegrating into the ISP as an educator while serving as the Master's program director for the Fine Arts department at Parsons School of Design and an assistant professor at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.The Whitney noted in its press release today that Yoon also recently served on a 15-member advisory committee “dedicated to helping shape the future of the ISP.”Developed in 1968 by former Director Ron Clark, the alternative and tuition-free education program for artists, curators, and critics boasts a high-profile alumni list including Jenny Holzer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Roberta Smith, Mark Dion, Gregg Bordowitz, Emily Jacir, Julian Schnabel, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, and Naomi Beckwith, among hundreds of others.
After 54 years, Clark passed the reins to Bordowitz in 2023, and Bordowitz appointed Nadal-Melsió as the program's inaugural associate director in 2024.The program was embroiled in controversy last spring when the Whitney canceled the 2024–25 Curatorial Studies fellows’ staging of “No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance,” a piece on Palestinian mourning by artists Noel Maghathe, Fadl Fakhouri, and Fargo Tb
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