esther [at] estherchoi [dot] net

Esther Choi applies her training as an architectural historian to her work as a multidisciplinary artist, which explores the politics of worldmaking as they relate to social, economic, and climatory realities. Her art practice—spanning photography, video, moving image installation, and social practice—focuses primarily on how the impulse to "design" and abstract nature and human nature connects to the reproduction of inequality. These issues are analyzed in her academic research via the historical entanglements between art, architecture, and the biological sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As an extension of her interests, she conceived of Office Hours, a BIPOC-led experiment in radical pedagogy as artistic practice. Since 2020, Office Hours has hosted 39+ online events centered on the sharing of liberatory worldmaking knowledge amongst BIPOC cultural practitioners; these sessions have been attended by 2000+ people of the global majority in over 20 nations and countries.

She has exhibited at The Camera Club of New York; Angell Gallery, Toronto; Fonderie Darling, Montréal; Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montréal; Galerie Thérèse Dion, Montréal; Venice Biennale 14th International Architecture; Lisbon Triennial; Texas State Galleries; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and other venues. Her artwork has been featured in 032C, Elephant, Artnet, PIN-UP, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Architectural Digest, and more. Choi is the creator of the subversive artist's cookbook Le Corbuffet (Prestel, 2019), which was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award for photography in 2020. Editorial commissions have appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Le Monde, Another Man, Intersection Magazine, Dazed and Confused, Vice, and The New York Times Magazine.

Choi's writing has been published in periodicals such as Artforum, E-Flux Architecture, Art Papers, Journal of Architectural Education, Architectural Review, and SSENSE. She is the coeditor of two volumes of architectural theory: Architecture At the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press, 2010) and Architecture Is All Over (Columbia U, 2017).

Choi has received grants and fellowships for her work from: the Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Council for the Arts, The Asian American Arts Alliance, Graham Foundation, Getty Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and The Ford Foundation, among others. She was a 2019 Resident of the Richard Rogers Fellowship in London, UK. In 2021, Choi received the David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for her doctoral dissertation in the field of architectural history.

From 2022-2023, Choi will be a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow. Choi is an Adjunct Associate Professor at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She received a joint PhD from the Department of Architecture and Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. Prior to Princeton, she earned an MDes AP from Harvard Graduate School of Design, an MFA in photography from Concordia University, and a BFA in photography from Toronto Metropolitan University.