Contact

esther@estherchoi.net
+1 (609) 937 9379

Biography

Esther Choi is an architecture historian, artist and writer based in New York. She is currently completing her dissertation, The Organization of Life, at Princeton University. Her scholarly research interests center on the entanglements between architecture and the life sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the intersections between artistic and architectural movements from the early twentieth century to the present. She holds degrees from Princeton University, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Concordia University and Ryerson University.

Choi is the co-editor of Architecture Is All Over (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City) and Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press). Her criticism and essays have explored the broad nexus of aesthetics, ethics, science and technology in a variety of subject matter, ranging from inflatables to the history of biotechnology. She has written for publications such as Artforum, Art Papers, The Journal of Architectural Education, Architectural Review and PIN-UP, and exhibition catalogues such as Hippie Modernism and Reaper: Richard Hamilton, Sigfried Giedion.

Choi trained previously as an artist, working primarily in installation and photography. Her photographs have appeared in Another Magazine, Vice Records and Dazed and Confused. For the past few years, she has explored the creation of participatory social sculptures using the medium of food. She is currently at work on Le Corbuffet, a conceptual cookbook based on these events that explores the intersections between food, art and design, for publication by Prestel in 2019.

Calling upon her past experience as a producer, she often uses cultural programming as an aesthetic tool to bring different constituencies in relation through sociability, co-creation and learning. Inspired by Félix Guattari's query about how to make a classroom operate like a work of art, these events have taken the form of art and pedagogy experiments, lectures, public conversations and symposia.

A frequent lecturer, she has participated in speaking engagements at venues such as E-flux, The Center for Experimental Humanities (NYU), University of Michigan, Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Cranbook Art Museum. Choi has held teaching appointments in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, The Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and The New School's Department of Art and Design History and Theory.