Christine Kuan
President & Executive Director
Before joining Creative Capital, Christine Kuan was CEO and Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, where she oversaw the Master’s Degree programs in Art Business, Contemporary Art, and Fine & Decorative Art & Design, as well as the Online, Summer, and Pre-College programs. In this role, she established new programs and partnerships with Tsinghua University in Beijing, Ewha University in Seoul, Centro University in Mexico City, and ESCP Business School in Paris. Kuan also launched a new scholarship program in partnership with Spelman College at the Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUCC).
Prior to Sotheby’s Institute, she was the Chief Curator and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Artsy, where she oversaw museum and institutional partnerships, digital collection strategy, open access policy, educational initiatives, and launched their auctions business, including benefit auctions such as Whitney Art Party, Brooklyn Museum Artists Ball, ICI Benefit, Public Art Fund Benefit, Sotheby’s x Planned Parenthood. Notably, Kuan established more than 500 museum and institutional partnerships worldwide, including Musée du Louvre, Musée Picasso, Musée d’Orsay, SFMOMA, J. Paul Getty Museum, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Diebenkorn Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, Frankenthaler Foundation, Fondation Cartier, and more.
Prior to Artsy, Kuan was Chief Curatorial Officer and Vice President of External Affairs at Artstor, a nonprofit image library founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where she led digital collections acquisitions and the funding for the digitization of archives and collections. She has also served as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Art Online/Grove Art Online at Oxford University Press, where she significantly expanded scholarly information on women artists and Asian contemporary artists working with guest editors Whitney Chadwick and Melissa Chiu, commissioning biographies on Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, and others.
Kuan has also worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Department of Asian Art and the General Counsel’s Office, and she has taught English Literature and Writing at the University of Iowa, Peking University, Rutgers University, and guest lectured at Stanford University’s pilot program of Arts Leadership.
She has been interviewed by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Refinery29, Vogue, New York, China Global Television Network (CGTN), and other outlets. Kuan’s publications include: Creative Legacies: Artists’ Estates and Foundations (eds. Kathy Battista and Bryan Faller); Rights and Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions (ed. Anne Young), Digital Heritage and Culture: Strategy and Implementation (eds. Herminia Din and Steven Wu), Guest Critic May 2022 for The Brooklyn Rail, and Best Practices Guide for Artist Demographic Data Coordination (Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation).
She has lectured and published extensively on digital strategy, museum policy, and new technologies for the art world. Kuan holds an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA in Art History and English Literature from Rutgers University.