Sooran Choi received her Ph.D. in art history from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York in 2018 with an emphasis on contemporary East Asian art (Korean art, with a secondary interest in Japanese and Chinese art). Her art historical studies include Korean studies, non-Western art/visual cultures, global art history/cultural studies/media studies, post-war transnational networks in art/visual cultures, activist art, and post-colonial theories. 

Choi is currently working on a book manuscript that examines post-WW II global artistic exchanges among interdisciplinary art groups in East Asia, the United States, and Europe, with case studies of South Korean renditions of various avant-garde art forms and discourses. It was awarded the 2018 College Art Association (CAA) Professional Development Fellowship in Art History. As additional work in process, she is researching transnational exchanges between ecological and land art practices, which includes the South Korean Nature Art movements from the 1980s and their connections to the Japanese and German ecological art movements--a topic that resonates with today’s climate changes and the ecological damages in our global environment.

Choi’s interest in comparative studies of diverse art historical trajectories across various cultures has crossed over into her teaching as an adjunct assistant professor at various campuses of the City University of New York, the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY) as well as, the Museum of Modern Art, where she has taught art history and cultural studies classes that spanned from Western Europe via the Islamic world and India to East Asia. Her past scholarly writing has included a wide and eclectic range of topics in Asian art and Korean studies, such as East Asian artists in diaspora, alternative art spaces in South Korea, Gwangju Biennials, the Korean War Memorial in Battery Park (NYC), Japanese students at the Bauhaus, and the eroticism of Japanese Shunga art.