Esther M. Choi is an artist, writer, and scholar whose work examines systems of representation and their role in shaping constructs such as nature, history, and cultural value. With a background in photography and architectural history and theory, her interdisciplinary practice spans photography, sculpture, and time-based media to explore how images mediate historical memory and our understanding of the natural world. Often revisiting overlooked aspects of canonical histories, Choi’s work is informed by critical frameworks such as new historicism and the cultural aesthetics of environmental representation. Her current research investigates the historical entanglements between photography and the petrochemical industries, focusing on their environmental and ideological impacts on contemporary life.

Choi’s work has been presented at venues including the Camera Club of New York, Texas State Galleries, Gallery 103 at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Parisian Laundry (Montréal), and Banvard Gallery at Ohio State University. She has also contributed to exhibitions such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Lisbon Triennial, and the Warsaw Under Construction Festival. In 2024, her photographs for T: The New York Times Style Magazine were nominated for an ASME National Magazine Award.

She has led participatory projects that extend beyond traditional exhibition contexts. Her artist’s book Le Corbuffet (Prestel, 2019)—a critique of the image economy framed within the structure of a cookbook—was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Photography Award. In 2020, she launched Office Hours, a participatory knowledge-sharing initiative addressing the historical underrepresentation of BIPOC practitioners in the cultural industries. The project later evolved into Public Service, a Ford Foundation-supported YouTube series dedicated to fostering social change within these fields.

Choi’s essays have appeared in e-flux, Artforum, Art Papers, Perspecta, Architectural Record, The Journal of Architectural Education, and Harvard Design Magazine. She co-edited Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press, 2010) and Architecture Is All Over (Columbia Books, 2017), and contributed to the edited volumes Hippie Modernism (Walker Art Center, 2015), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2021), and Reaper: Richard Hamilton, Sigfried Giedion (JRP Ringier, 2017).

Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, Getty Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, Graham Foundation, Society of Architectural Historians, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her projects have been featured and reviewed in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, 032c, Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, Architect’s Newspaper, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, Elephant, and more.

A 2022 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow, Choi has taught photography, criticism and curatorial practice, and architectural history and theory at OCAD University, The Cooper Union, and other institutions. She holds a joint PhD in Architectural History and Theory and Interdisciplinary Humanities from Princeton University, as well as degrees in photography and architectural history/theory from Harvard Graduate School of Design, Concordia University, and Toronto Metropolitan University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.