Soyoung Yoon Named New Director of Whitney’s Independent Study Program

News Whitney Museum Suspends Independent Study Program After Cancelling Pro-Palestinian Performance Elaine YJ Zheng

The Whitney Museum of American Art has appointed art historian and educator Soyoung Yoon as director of its Independent Study Program (ISP), formally restarting the influential programme after a year-long suspension prompted by one of the most contentious episodes in the museum’s recent history.

Yoon has longstanding ties to the ISP. A member of its 2006–2007 Critical Studies cohort, she later taught in the programme for more than a decade and recently served on a 15-member advisory committee convened by Whitney curator Adrienne Edwards to help shape its future.

In announcing her appointment, Yoon traced her first encounter with the ISP to her activism in the student movements of Seoul, recalling it as “an ideal for theory in practice, as a mode of study as well as politics and ethics”.

She continued: “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.”

A scholar whose work draws on Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, Yoon emerges from the intellectual traditions that have long defined the programme. She previously served as director of the Fine Arts MFA programme at New York’s Parsons School of Design at The New School, and continues to hold the position of associate professor of art history and visual studies at The New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.

Her appointment follows the Whitney’s decision in June 2025 to pause the 2025–2026 academic year while undertaking a search for new leadership. The move came after the cancellation of a Palestine-related performance and the departure of longtime associate director Sara Nadal-Melsió, prompting criticism from alumni, faculty and participants who argued that the museum had compromised the programme’s tradition of intellectual independence.

At the time, the Whitney said the search for a new ISP director would be conducted in consultation with alumni, former faculty,and supporters, though it has since disclosed little about the work of the advisory committee convened to guide the process. In a statement announcing Yoon’s appointment, Edwards said it was “the culmination of a process undertaken with deep consideration over many months”.

For more than five decades, the ISP has occupied a singular position within contemporary art as a space for critical theory, political inquiry, and forms of dissent that often sit uneasily within institutional frameworks. The recent dispute, therefore, exposed a deeper tension between the programme’s self-conception as a site of critical autonomy and its position within a major museum.

Main image: Yoon was previously a of the ISP’s 2006–2007 Critical Studies cohort. Photo: Bryan Derballa, courtesy the Whitney.