Jenny Lin is Director of the MA Program in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere and Associate Professor of Critical Studies in USC’s Roski School of Art and Design. As an art historian, writer, and curator, Professor Lin explores relations between modern and contemporary art and design and social phenomena such as urbanization and globalization. Her first book, Above Sea: Contemporary Art, Urban Culture, and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai (Manchester University Press, 2019), investigates art, architecture, fashion, and film created in and about cosmopolitan Shanghai. Professor Lin is the recipient of the 2024-2025 Tsao Family Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Rome, where she is conducting research towards a new book project, The Global/Art Fashion System: New Silk Roads through China, Italy, and the United States, an exploration of international art and fashion exchanges that illuminate geopolitical dynamics and cross-cultural collaborations.

Professor Lin’s research and exhibition projects have been supported by numerous additional fellowships and grants, including from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, UC Pacific Rim Research Program, Confucius Institute, US Department of Education, and Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. Her art criticism and essays about varied topics (e.g., contemporary Asian and Asian American art, cultural revolution, queer feminist video installation, transnational art/fashion hybrids, public art and counter-monuments, design in Silicon Valley) have appeared in Art Margins, Shanghai Culture, Frieze, Flash Art, X-TRA, Konturen, ArtReview, and anthologies including Fandom as Methodology, Participatory Urbanisms, Companion to Urban Imaginaries, Cities of Light, Aesthetics of Gentrification, and A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework.

She has been invited to lecture and read her writings (which span art history, cultural studies, and poetry) around the world, including, most recently, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, University of Oxford, and the Poetry Foundation. Professor Lin is affiliated faculty in Art History and the East Asian Studies Center at USC, where she has organized intercultural conferences, exhibitions, film screenings and performance art events, such as “Love, Lust, Caution: A Centennial Celebration of the Art and Life of Eileen Chang,” “Ku’er Worlds: Queering Art and Identity in Chinese American Art and Film,” “Live Artists Live: Sings of Freedom,” and “Taipei Night at USC Pacific Asia Museum.”

Professor Lin has extensive curatorial and studio art experience, having worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and with artists and galleries in Shanghai since the early 2000s. The catalogue for her exhibition, Picturing Global China (University of Oregon White Box Gallery), received a Typography Award from Communication Arts. Most recently, she curated the exhibition Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists (USC Pacific Asia Museum, 2024), and produced a related special edition publication. Professor Lin holds her MA and PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and BA in Architectural Studies and Italian Studies from Brown University.