JiaJia Fei Says the Art World’s Digital Future Depends on Pay Transparency
JiaJia Fei has spent much of her career building systems the art world did not yet know it needed. After studying art history at Bryn Mawr and graduating in 2008, she entered museums at a moment when social media was still taking shape and many institutions had not yet developed a digital strategy. She taught herself the tools, launched the Jewish Museum’s first Twitter and Instagram accounts, and later spent six years at the Guggenheim helping build its online presence from the ground up.
Fei eventually returned to the Jewish Museum as its first director of digital, a role in which she says she grew the museum’s social following by 1,000 percent. After more than a decade inside institutions, she left to found what she describes as the first digital agency for the art world. Her client list now includes the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Canyong, Obama Presidential Center, and Independent Art Fair.
That move, she says, was not simply about entrepreneurship. It was also about choosing a field where her skills could travel beyond a single institution and where she could decide more deliberately who she worked with. In a conversation about her career, Fei described her path as one shaped by doing things differently and by refusing to wait for institutions to catch up.
Her comments also point to a larger labor problem in the sector. Fei said she earned $30,000 a year in her first job in New York City, a salary that was difficult to sustain even then. She noted that many arts workers take on additional jobs to make ends meet, but argued that the system becomes especially unjust when extra work is a necessity rather than a choice.
For Fei, pay transparency is the first step toward addressing discrimination. She also drew a sharp distinction between institutional support and employee advocacy, saying that human resources represents the company, not the worker. In her view, the art world’s slow pace of change is not just a technological issue but a structural one — and one that will not improve without more honest conversations about compensation, mobility, and power.
