Karin Oen-Lee

Karin G. Oen-Lee is a curator and art historian based in Singapore where she is Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore as well as Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History in NTU’s School of Humanities. She works on historical, modern, and contemporary creative practices related to the transcultural and the transmediatic – interests also reflected in NTU CCA Singapore’s current focus on critical intersections of art, technology, and community building. She was recently co-editor of Perspectives on Design Education from India and Asia (2025) and SEA: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia (2022). Previously, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Crow Museum of Asian Art (Dallas), Oen-Lee curated projects with artists interested in the social spaces of history, technology, and materiality including Afruz Amighi, Haroon Mirza, Jean Shin, Koki Tanaka, and teamLab. As a university lecturer, she teaches a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate classes on diverse subjects including museum studies, new media art, and nineteenth century photography in Asia. She received her BA from Stanford University, MA from Christie’s New York, and PhD in the history, theory, and criticism of art and architecture from MIT.