Adela Kim

Adela Kim works on modern and contemporary art. Her research interests include the legacies of Conceptual art; institutional critique; the intersection of property, contracts, and performance in art; and collective social practices.  Her dissertation project, “Beyond Institutional Critique: Tearing in the Work of Andrea Fraser, 1986 — Present,” explores the ways that Fraser’s works open up an affective and reparative dimension to critique, leading to an expanded and an alternate genealogy of institutional critique through sociology, psychoanalysis, and Group Relations. 

Adela has been the recipient of the Mason and Julia Gross Scholarship (2020); Robert Lehman Distinguished Fellowship (2019); the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Pre-Prospectus Summer Fellowship (2019); the Dumbarton Oaks Humanities Fellowship (2017); and the Fulbright Study and Research Grant in Berlin, Germany (2016). She was a 2021-2022 Curatorial Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library. Adela’s writing has appeared in Source: Notes in the History of ArtThe Journal of Visual CulturesArtforumTexte zur Kunst, and The Burlington Contemporary, among others. 

Concurrent with her PhD, Adela is pursuing a joint MBA degree at the Yale School of Management with a focus on non-profit management. A Forté Fellow and a Frederick Frank ’54 B.A. Scholar, Adela has worked as a consultant for arts organizations and has conducted impact evaluations and financial analysis. 

Adela holds an A.B. in History of Art with Highest Honors from Harvard University, where she was awarded the Matthew Abramson Prize for Best Thesis in History of Art. She has worked at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, and documenta 14