ABOUT THE CURATOR

Jessica Duby | jd4488@nyu.edu

"Artistic Floodlights" is a digital curatorial research project created for the Fall 2019 graduate course, “Case Studies in Curatorial Activism” with Professor Grace Aneiza Ali in the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

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Before enrolling at Tisch, Jessica Duby worked at the Smithsonian’s National Museums of Asian Art and National Portrait Gallery. At the National Portrait Gallery, she created the museum’s first biannual American Portrait Gala, now in its third iteration, as well as the museum’s Diplomatic Cabinet, for which she won the Smithsonian’s Advancement Innovation Award in 2016. At the Freer|Sackler, she created the now annual immersive program “Found in Translation” which celebrates creativity sparked by cross-cultural explorations and features musicians, chefs, and performances artists. She also implemented the exhibition “Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang,” featuring a 3-D animated experience of Dunhuang Cave 220, a UNESCO World Heritage site just outside of the Gobi Desert, and designed its related programming.  

She independently co-curated activist exhibitions “OKFORU” at Union Arts, DC and Chinatown Soup in New York, and “Bread and Roses” at The Fridge, DC.

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She is interested in using art as an invitation for self-reflection, the poetics of curating, performance as intervention, and the possibilities of interdisciplinary exhibitions to bring communities together around cultural zeitgeists.