Whitney Museum Names Soyoung Yoon to Lead Its Independent Study Program
The Whitney Museum has appointed Soyoung Yoon as the next director of its Independent Study Program, a move that places an alumna and longtime faculty member at the center of one of the most influential nondegree programs in American art education. Yoon will begin on June 16. She is the third director in the ISP’s history and the first woman and person of color to hold the role.
Her appointment comes after a year of upheaval for the program. The Whitney paused the ISP last June, did not accept applicants for the 2025–26 cohort, and has said the next class will arrive in fall 2027. The museum has described the pause as a response to leadership transitions following the retirement of founding director Ron Clark in 2023. A 15-person advisory committee, convened by Adrienne Edwards, helped map the program’s future.
Yoon’s ties to the ISP run deep. She was the Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies fellow for the 2006–07 cohort, which included Alex Kitnick, Brendan Fernandes, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Saya Woolfalk. She later returned as faculty from 2012 to 2023, where she led seminars in critical theory. In a statement, Yoon said she first encountered the ISP as “an ideal for theory in practice,” linking it to her activism in student movements in Seoul and describing it as a community for people who question the institutions and disciplines that shape artistic life.
Outside the Whitney, Yoon is director of the Fine Arts MFA Program at Parsons School of Design and an associate professor of art history and visual studies at The New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. From 2013 to 2024, she directed Lang College’s Visual Studies Program, where she tripled its undergraduate program.
The ISP has long occupied an outsized place in the art world despite not granting degrees. Its alumni include artists Tony Cokes, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renée Green, Emily Jacir, Pope. L, and Constantina Zavitsanos, along with curators and historians such as Huey Copeland, Jennifer González, Richard Armstrong, Naomi Beckwith, Johanna Burton, and Sheena Wagstaff.
The program’s pause also followed controversy over a Whitney decision to cancel No Aesthetics Outside my Freedom: Mourning, Militancy and Performance, a performance organized by the 2024–25 ISP cohort and focused on the war and genocide in Gaza. Artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi accused the museum of censorship after the cancellation. The Whitney said at the time that the decision was “clear and necessary,” while also saying it would continue to support difficult discussion of urgent social issues.
Yoon’s appointment suggests the museum is trying to restore continuity to a program whose influence has always rested on its ability to test the boundaries between study, politics, and artistic practice.
