Great Hall Exhibition Series Fall 2026

Jennifer Byun

Jennifer Byun is a second-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her research centers on modern and contemporary East Asian art, with a current focus on communal art practices within the non-dominant art scene of 1980s Korea and their relationships to land, care, and archival memory. Jennifer is the recipient of the 2026 AHL Foundation–Grace Charity Foundation Research Fellowship and currently serves as the 2026–2027 Curatorial Research Intern at Dia Art Foundation. She received a B.F.A. in Contemporary Art from Konkuk University.

Shreya Dwibedy

Shreya Dwibedy is a second-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts. Their research interest lies in contemporary time-based media with a particular focus on Southeast Asian artists. They have held curatorial and admin roles at various museums and nonprofits over the years, most recently working on Incendiaries: The People’s Flag Show 1970 at 80WSE. Shreya holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Smith College.

Lilia Muscarella

Lilia Muscarella is a second-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, where she studies modern and contemporary art of the Americas. Her current research considers performance art made by women under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, reading the abject body as a site of dissent. She works across the avant-garde, queer and feminist methodologies, and debates over ephemerality, documentation, and the limits of the archive. Through her work with the experimental art space U-Haul Gallery, she extends these questions into institutional practice, interrogating access and representation. She holds a B.A. in Communications from the University of Southern California.

Phoebe More

Phoebe More is a second-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her research interests center around contemporary Asian art, with a particular focus on the ‘85 New Wave and the Avant-Garde in China. She dedicates herself professionally to furthering accessibility in museum and arts spaces, working as a Mellon Foundation funded fellow with the NYU Center for Disability Studies ASAP program. She holds a B.A. in Art History and East Asian Studies from Johns Hopkins University.

Daisy Ryan

Daisy Ryan is a second-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on performance, materiality, affect, and queer and feminist methodologies across the Americas, Europe, and Australia. She served as Managing Editor at A-M Journal, a global arts and culture publication, from 2023-2025. Daisy holds an Honours degree in Art History from the University of Sydney.

Janice Zhai

Janice Zhai is a second-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her research examines modern and contemporary East Asian diasporic art, focusing on how bodily abjection encodes historical and cultural memory, and how the photographic index functions as a contested site of truth and translation. She currently serves as the inaugural Whitney-IFA Asian American Art Curatorial Research Fellow. She holds a B.A. in Art History from Columbia University.

Zia Pao-Ziegler

Zia Pao-Ziegler is a first-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, particularly artists of the Asian and African diasporas, with a focus on questions of cultural context, visibility, and dialogic approaches to interpretation. She holds a B.A. in Art History and Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago.

Alicia YS Lee

Alicia Yeon Seung Lee is a first-year M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, whose curatorial research examines what they term “imaginary time”—the collective denial of death and ecological finitude that underwrites modern fantasies of endless growth, productivity, and permanence. This research is particularly informed by their relationship to Korean diasporic identity and by the ritual tradition of 굿 (gut), which Alicia approaches not as an ethnographic subject but as a model of embodied, communal knowledge—a space where grief is collectively held rather than privatized, and where memories excluded from official histories can resurface.