Jurors
Melissa Chiu
Museum Director
Vice President, Global Art Programs
Asia Society, New York, NY
Dr. Melissa Chiu is Museum Director and Vice President, Global Art Programs, Asia Society in New York where she has worked since 2001 to expand the scholarship of Asian art through major initiatives such as the launch of a contemporary art collection to complement the museum's outstanding Rockefeller Collection of traditional Asian art. Previously, she was Founding Director of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia (1996-2001). As a leading authority on Asian contemporary art, she has organized nearly 30 exhibitions of artists from across Asia including China, Japan, Iran, Pacific Islands and Korea. Amongst them the first retrospective of Chinese artist Zhang Huan (Zhang Huan: Altered States, 2007) and an historical exhibition of art from China's Cultural Revolution (Art and China's Revolution, 2008). Chiu earned an M.A. in Arts Administration (1994) and a PhD (2005) in Art History in her native Australia, and has served as Editor for The Grove Dictionary of Art's section on Asian contemporary art published by Oxford University Press. She is the author of numerous articles and books including Breakout:Chinese Art Outside China (2007), which focuses on the international Chinese artistic diaspora and Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know (2008). She is Vice President of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the lead professional organization for art museums in the United States.
Paolo Colombo
Art Advisor, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Managing Director, Dorje Film, Roma
Paolo Colombo is currently an art advisor to the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art and Managing Director of Dorje Film in Rome. Most recently he has curated "In Praise of Shadows", an exhibition on the relation between Turkish and Greek shadow theatre with contemporary art - it will be traveling to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2008), and to the Benaki Museum, Athens (2009) He is the former Curator of MAXXI Museo, Nazionale delle arti del XXI Secolo in Rome. From 1989 to 2000 he was Director of the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva and in 1999 he curated the 6th Istanbul Biennale. He is a Board member of the ICI (Independent Curators International), New York and the Artist Advisory Board of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.
Ingrid Schaffner
Senior Curator
Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
Ingrid Schaffner joined ICA as Senior Curator in 2001. Her recent exhibitions at ICA include Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay (winter 2009, with Jenelle Porter), which explores clay as a material in contemporary art; Douglas Blau (fall 2009), the first exhibition of new work in nearly a decade; The Puppet Show (winter 2008, with Carin Kuoni), a group exhibition that looked at the imagery of puppets in contemporary art; Karen Kilimnik (spring 2007), the first American survey of the work by a Philadelphia artist of international stature; and Accumulated Vision, Barry Le Va, a survey of the Post-minimalist artist's work of the past 40 years (winter 2005). Working independently, among the exhibitions she has organized are Jess: To and from the Printed Page (Independent Curators International, 2007); (Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art in the 1970s (White Columns, New York, 2003); Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (Equitable Gallery, New York, 1998); Deep Storage, (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1997); Chocolate! (Swiss Institute, 1995); and Return of the Cadavre Exquis (The Drawing Center, New York 1993). She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art. Her publications include Salvador DalÃ's Dream of Venus: The Surrealist Funhouse at the 1939 World's Fair (Princeton Architectural Press) and an essay on wall text in Questions of Practice: What Makes a Great Exhibition? (Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative). Schaffner, who participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program, earned a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MA from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.
At ICA she is currently organizing the first major museum survey of the work of the illustrator Maira Kalman.