Hyewon Yi, PhD, is Director and Curator of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery and Assistant Professor of Art History at SUNY Old Westbury. She has an extensive track record of curatorial activities, having mounted over fifty exhibitions at the Wallace Gallery, introducing emerging and mid-career contemporary US and international artists. The Wallace Gallery serves students of the Visual Arts Department, the larger student body of the College, and the art-going public of New York City and Long Island. Since December 2023, Yi has been working as a museum educator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, giving tours to visitors occasionally. Yi writes often about Contemporary art and artists, and has conducted interviews with artists from around the world. Career highlights include winning the Fund for Korean Art Abroad 2021–2022 in support of the exhibition Sung Rok Choi: Great Chain of Being (February/March 2022), and receiving the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service in May 2022.

Recently Yi designed the College’s new gallery, ART LAB of Social Justice & Environmental Justice Institute (SEJI). She served as a curator for the AHL Foundation from 2007 through 2015, assisting the not-for-profit organization in its early days by organizing seven exhibitions. As an independent curator, Yi has mounted exhibitions at White Box, Dean Project, and Gana Art in Manhattan, Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, and the Brain Factory in Seoul. She has served as curator and consultant for the AHL Foundation from 2007 through 2015, assisting the not-for-profit organization in New York City in its early days by organizing seven exhibitions among other works. Her curatorial work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, artcritical, Newsday, Times Ledger, Queens Tribune, and Korea Times. Born in Seoul, Yi earned a BFA (Summa Cum Laude) from Duk Sung Women’s University, Seoul, an MA. in Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Yi received a Study Abroad Scholarship from her Korean alma mater and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY.

Yi’s doctoral dissertation, “Photographer as Participant Observer: Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham, and Nobuyoshi Araki,” which analyzes four major living proponents of the quasi- or gonzo-documentary photographic and filmic method, examines the shift toward a subjectivized or autobiographical photography, a development that can be seen as a trans-cultural and trans-national phenomenon.