Photo by Naomieh Jovin
Patricia Eunji Kim, PhD is an art historian, curator, and educator based in New York City. She is Assistant Professor at New York University and Senior Editor and Curator-At-Large at Monument Lab. She is currently a 2023-24 Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies.
A specialist in the visual and material culture of the ancient Mediterranean and western Asia, Dr. Kim uses methods from the arts and humanities to explore questions of gender, race and ethnicity, power, and memory from antiquity and the present. Her monograph, The Art of Hellenistic Queenship: Bodies of Power (under contract with Cambridge University Press), is the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of queenship from western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean from the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE. This research project has led to a suite of other publications, an arts-driven public symposium, and an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Dr. Kim is co-editor of Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press 2020), a book that features artists, humanists, and scientists to model new modes of interdisciplinary collaboration in the environmental humanities; The National Monument Audit (Monument Lab 2021), the first assessment of the monument landscape across the United States and its territories; Shaping the Past (BPB, in press), which highlights artists, curators, and activists who reimagine monuments toward racial and gendered justice; and Queens in Antiquity and the Present: Speculative Visions and Critical Histories (Bloomsbury, Forthcoming), an interdisciplinary and arts-driven volume that explores methodological and theoretical approaches to queenship in ancient Mediterranean worlds, and its receptions and reverberations in modern and contemporary contexts.
Guided by historical depth and an object-based mode of thinking, Dr. Kim uses curatorial and public engagement work to advocate for the place and value of art and archaeology in society. In this regard, Dr. Kim has experimented with research and curatorial methods that create open knowledge communities and are committed to public accessibility. She has collaborated with artists, students, scholars from the humanities and sciences, as well as experts in civic tech and data to develop art installations, educational materials, conferences, and events for diverse public audiences. Kim’s curatorial experience includes researching artifacts from university and encyclopedic museums, co-creating community-driven digital archives, and organizing academic arts symposia. Exhibition and programming experience includes Sex: A History in 30 Objects (2015-2016); The Golden Age of King Midas (2016); Cultures in the Crossfire: Stories from Syria and Iraq (2017-2018); Date/um: Ecological Temporalities Across the Schuylkill River (2016-2017); Data Refuge and Data Refuge Storytelling (2016-20); Shaping the Past (2020-2021); Monument Lab Field Trip and Field Trip: Museums (2020, 2022); Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies: Decolonizing Ecological Encounters (2022, 2023-24); and Slow Motion (2024-2025).
Dr. Kim earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.