The Whitney Museum in New York has named Soyoung Yoon as the next director of its Independent Study Program (ISP). She will start in her role on June 16.
Yoon will be only the third director in ISP’s history and the first women and person of color to lead the program. Her hiring comes just over a year after the Whitney controversially paused the ISP. The program did not accept applicants for the 2025–26 cohort, but will welcome its next class in the fall 2027.
Yoon is currently the director of the Fine Arts MFA Program at the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York. She is also an associate professor of art history and visual studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. Previously, she directed Lang College’s Visual Studies Program from 2013 to 2024. At Lang, she tripled its undergraduate program.
Yoon is also an alumna of ISP, having been the Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies fellow for the 2006–07 cohort, which also included Alex Kitnick, Brendan Fernandes, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Saya Woolfalk. She returned to ISP as a faculty member from 2012 to 2023, where she led seminars in critical theory.
“I first encountered the ISP as an ideal for theory in practice, as a mode of study as well as politics and ethics, through my activism in the student movements in Seoul,” Yoon said in a statement. “The ISP continues to be a community for those who are not quite at home in their institutions, disciplines, and practices, for those who question the methodologies, the discourses, the habitus, the social worlds of such practices, and thereby effect changes, become leaders, new legends, teachers for those to come.”
The ISP is one of the country’s most influential programs for post-secondary learning, though it does not grant degrees. Its alumni include artists like Tony Cokes, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renée Green, Emily Jacir, Pope. L, and Constantina Zavitsanos, as well as curators and art historians like Huey Copeland, Jennifer González, Richard Armstrong, Naomi Beckwith, Johanna Burton, and Sheena Wagstaff.
The ISP has been paused since last June, when Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf announced the news in a letter addressed to the “Whitney ISP Community,” writing that the decision was made with “much consideration with colleagues and with a deep sense of responsibility to the program’s legacy and future.”
Rothkopf cited the retirement of the ISP’s founding director Ron Clark in 2023 as the main reason. Shortly after Clark’s retirement, artist and ISP alumnus Gregg Bordowitz was hired as director by Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s previous director. But in February 2025, Rothkopf demoted Bordowitz to director-at-large, a role that ended that June. In a statement about the pausing of ISP, the Whitney said that “the ISP has faced challenges transitioning from Ron Clark’s direction” and that “it would be a disservice to welcome a new cohort in September with the present gap in leadership.”
The decision to pause the ISP, however, came only two weeks after the Whitney canceled a performance that addressed the war and genocide in Gaza and was organized by its 2024–25 ISP cohort. Rothkopf’s letter did not address the cancelation of the ISP event. Artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi charged the museum with censorship, saying they were told the performance, titled No Aesthetics Outside my Freedom: Mourning, Militancy and Performance, was canceled because it contained “exclusionary and inflammatory” content in violation of the Whitney’s policies.
A museum spokesperson told the Art Newspaper at the time the decision to cancel was not taken “lightly” but was “clear and necessary,” while adding that the museum will “continue to support difficult and provocative discussion of important events and social issues.” An open letter signed by hundreds of alumni and faculty of the ISP soon circulated in support of the three artists, adding that they “uplift [the artists’] efforts to create and debate art while reckoning with political violence and institutional coercion, and affirm our shared solidarity against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Yoon recently served on a 15-person advisory committee, made up of ISP alumni and faculty, meant to plot the future of the ISP, which was convened by Adrienne Edwards, Whitney senior curator and associate director of curatorial programs.
“This appointment is the culmination of a process undertaken with deep consideration over many months,” Edwards said in a statement, adding that Yoon “stood out as a compelling leader” within the context of the advisory committee. “She brings intellectual rigor, a superb administrative acuity, and unwavering belief in the importance of theoretical and artistic inquiry and I cannot imagine a more thoughtful or committed steward to lead the Whitney’s ISP forward.”
