Kyle Stephan

Background

About Kyle Stephan

Kyle Stephan, Ph.D, is a curator and historian of contemporary art and time-based media. Her interdisciplinary research-based practice engages the aesthetics, politics, technology, and media of Latin America and the United States since 1960. Stephan has been a curator of modern and contemporary art for over a decade. Currently, she is the Nam June Paik Curatorial Fellow in the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at the HArvard Art Museums, focusing on collections research, exhibitions, and acquisitions related to contemporary art and time-based media. She was the assistant curator for The Matter of Photography in the Americas, a major loan exhibition of Latin American conceptual photography at the Cantor Center for Visual Art at Stanford University, and served as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As an independent curator, she has organized exhibitions of visual, performing, and media art for international cultural organizations, including the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Bank of Brazil Cultural Centers, Los Angeles’ REDCAT Theatre at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, San Francisco Camerawork, and the British Film Institute, where she was a curator of film and multimedia art from 2005-2010. Stephan is the producer, researcher, and story consultant for Women Art Revolution (WAR), a documentary feature film about the cultural, social, and artistic impact of the feminist art movement in the United States. Named one of the top three documentaries of 2010 by the Museum of Modern Art, WAR screened at film festivals worldwide including the Sundance, Toronto, and Berlin International Film Festivals, and in US theaters with Zeitgeist Films. She has also successfully produced and collaborated on the development of interactive media artworks and live media-based performances exhibited at venues such as Villette Numerique Paris, V2 Rotterdam, ZKM Karlsruhe, ISEA, The Broad, and the New York Digital Salon. In 2019, Stephan earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University with a specialization in modern and contemporary art from Latin America and the United States. Her writing appears in exhibition catalogs published by the ZKM, Bank of Brazil Cultural Centers, and Stanford University Press as well as in art journals and online outlets such as Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Art and Rhizome. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, “Cosmic Noise: Juan Downey and the Postcolonial Politics of Cold War Communication.”