Kolleen Ku

PhD Candidate

Areas of interest: Modern and contemporary art; art of the Asian diaspora; feminist and queer approaches; abstraction; migration and cross-cultural exchanges.

Kolleen Ku is a PhD candidate who focuses on global modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation project explores the convergence of modernist abstraction, Asian racialization, and alien citizenship through the work of East Asian diasporic artists in the early twentieth-century United States.

Originally from Hong Kong, Kolleen received her B.A. from Columbia University in Art History and English. Prior to her doctoral studies, Kolleen worked in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. She is currently the 2023-24 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art.