Whitney Names New Director of Independent Study Program
Soyoung Yoon’s appointment comes after the museum canceled a Palestine-related performance and suspended the program for a year.
The Whitney Museum of American Art has appointed Soyoung Yoon as the new director of its Independent Study Program (ISP) following a year-long suspension of the fellowship. Yoon enters the role a year after the museum terminated the ISP's former associate director, Sara Nadal-Melsió, in the fallout of the abrupt cancellation of a Palestine-related performance curated by members of the 2024–25 ISP cohort.
A regular visiting faculty member for the program, Yoon was a Critical Studies fellow in the 2006–07 ISP cohort and taught film and media studies at Purchase College while completing a PhD in art history at Stanford University. She shifted to the New School in 2013, simultaneously reintegrating into the ISP as an educator while serving as the Master's program director for the Fine Arts department at Parsons School of Design and an assistant professor at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.
The Whitney noted in its press release today that Yoon also recently served on a 15-member advisory committee “dedicated to helping shape the future of the ISP.”
Developed in 1968 by former Director Ron Clark, the alternative and tuition-free education program for artists, curators, and critics boasts a high-profile alumni list including Jenny Holzer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Roberta Smith, Mark Dion, Gregg Bordowitz, Emily Jacir, Julian Schnabel, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, and Naomi Beckwith, among hundreds of others. After 54 years, Clark passed the reins to Bordowitz in 2023, and Bordowitz appointed Nadal-Melsió as the program's inaugural associate director in 2024.
The program was embroiled in controversy last spring when the Whitney canceled the 2024–25 Curatorial Studies fellows’ staging of “No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance,” a piece on Palestinian mourning by artists Noel Maghathe, Fadl Fakhouri, and Fargo Tbakhi. The museum came across a recording of an earlier staging of the performance, organized by Jewish Currents and The Poetry Project, in which Tbakhi instructed audience members who “believe in Israel in any incarnation” to leave. According to Nadal-Melsió, Whitney Director Scott Rothkopf said that the preface went against the museum's “community guidelines,” despite there being no indication that such an introduction would be part of the ISP staging.
Hundreds of program alumni and community members signed an open letter in support of the affected cohort, whose members accused the museum of censorship and withdrew or altered their works in the ISP exhibitions and canceled scheduled appearances in protest. Amid public scrutiny, the museum announced that Nadal-Melsió's role was being dissolved, and that the ISP would be suspended for the 2025–26 year as the “program is without a Director.”
In an opinion published in Hyperallergic, Nadal-Melsió said the program's legacy and future had been “thoroughly compromised.”
“Even after experiencing how far the Whitney was willing to go, I would and continue to do the same: offer my full and unwavering support to the censored Palestinian artists and the ISP cohort,” Nadal-Melsió wrote. “Only by expressing dissent when it matters, by embracing the risk and uncertainty of any political action, do we become a critical mass.”
In a statement today, Yoon said she was “honored and thrilled” to helm the program. “The ISP continues to be a community for those who are not quite at home in their institutions, disciplines, and practices, for those who question the methodologies, the discourses, the habitus, the social worlds of such practices, and thereby effect changes, become leaders, new legends, teachers for those to come,” Yoon said.
