Faculty

Profile

Soyoung Yoon is Director of Fine Arts MFA at Parsons School of Design and Associate Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. Yoon received her PhD in Art History from Stanford University and holds a BA from Seoul National University. She was also a Faculty at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program (ISP) till 2023. Prior to joining The New School, Yoon taught at SUNY Purchase College's Film Conservatory. 

Yoon’s research offers a sustained inquiry into the politics of mobility and rhetorics of testimony, witnessing, and storytelling in relation to the moving image. She is especially attentive to how art participates in capital’s “expropriation of the senses”: the creation of productive and unproductive bodies, of new capacities and incapacities of perception and experience. Yoon is currently in the process of completing two monographs: Walkie Talkie on the rise of cinéma vérité amid anti-colonial struggles, new techniques of policing, and the new technological capacity for sync sound; and TV Buddhas on theories of suture and narrative, surveillance, and the body politic. A new book on the mattress as an artistic motif, A Mattress is Not a Bed, is in production. 

Courses, designed and taught (select): 

• Stills: Photography and Its Theories
• Loop: The Electronic Image and Its Theories 
• The Strut of Vision: Histories and Theories of Perspective in the Arts
• Black Boxes and White Cubes: Between Dance and the Visual Arts (team-taught)
• Art and Labor
• Frankenstein: Art and the Body Politic 
• Shame: A Story of Visual Art

Alternate e-mail address: [email protected]

Degrees Held

Ph.D., Art History, Stanford University

M.A., Art History, Stanford University

B.A. summa cum laude, Art History & English Literature, Seoul National University 

Recent Publications

• “The Diabolic Dicteé,” in She Follows No Progression: A Theresa Has Kyung Cha Reader, eds. Juwon Jun and Rachel Valinsky (New York: Wendy’s Subway, 2024), 209-219
• “The Rules of the Game” in Remembering a Dance / Parts of Some Sextets, 1965-2019, eds. Yvonne Rainer and Emily Coates (New York: Performa, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Lenz Press, 2023), 110-121
• “Majestic Necessity,” in Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It’s Kept (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2022), 259-265
• “Christ, Santa Claus, Doctor Deliverer: For Carolee Schneemann,” Camera Obscura 107, vol. 36, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 175-183
• “King’s Speech: On Arthur Jafa’s akingondcomethas,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 69 (Spring 2019): 74-83
• “Do a Number: The Facticity of the Voice, or Reading Stop-and-Frisk Data,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol. 39, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 397-424
• “Where Is That Music Coming From? On Yvonne Rainer’s The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move?” in Yvonne Rainer: Moving and Being Moved, ed. Yvonne Rainer (Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2017), 39-56
• “Figure vs. Ground, White vs. Black (Blue): Sondra Perry’s Blue Room and Technologies of Race” in Sondra Perry: Typhoon Coming On (Cologne: Koenig Books, 2018), 75-85
• “Judith Scott’s What is Property?: An Inquiry into Principles of Dependency, Propriety and Self-Possession of an ‘Outsider’ Artist,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 26, no.2-3 (July-November 2016): 241-251
• “Cinema Against the ‘Permanent Curfew of Geometry’: Guy Debord’s On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959),” Grey Room 52 (Summer 2013): 38-61

Performances and Appearances

Research Interests

Photography, Film & Media Theory

Postwar and Contemporary Art

Art & Labor

Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory

Feminism, Queer Theory, and Disability Studies 

Awards And Honors

• Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies Faculty Research Fellowship, The New School for Social Research, 2020-21
• Hauser & Wirth Institute Research Fellowship, 2019-20
• Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought (GIDEST) Faculty Research Fellowship, The New School for Social Research, 2017-18; GIDEST Steering Committee from 2020-present
• Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; Article: “Do a Number: The Facticity of the Voice, or Reading Stop-and-Frisk Data”
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University
• Joanne Cassullo Faculty Fellowship, Whitney ISP, 2013-14
• The Guiding Light Award in Excellence of Teaching, Purchase College, SUNY, 2012
• Stanford University Centennial Teaching Award, 2006