Studio: esther (at) estherchoi (dot) net
Photographic Commissions: Visual Studies
Cooper Union faculty profile: The Cooper Union
Instagram: @esthermchoi

Esther M. Choi is interested in how modern visual and spatial technologies, especially photography as a descriptive system, influence concepts of nature in our postnatural and globalized world. Her conceptual photographs and films transform the genres of still life and landscape into allegorical spaces through a combinatory image-making process. Postnatural materials, such as artificial foliage, synthetic fur, hydrotreated petroleum, or industrialized wheat, often form the basis for large-scale compositions that challenge our perception of what is natural and normal. Her process revisits pictorial traditions, ranging from bodegón, trompe l'oeil, and East Asian multi-perspectival techniques, to stimulate a critical reconsideration of how the postnatural world has been visually represented throughout history, for whom and why, and at what cost.

Choi's work has had solo and group presentations at Texas State Galleries, San Marcos, TX; Banvard Gallery at Ohio State University, Columbus, OH; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee; The Camera Club of New York, New York, NY; Parisian Laundry, Montréal, QC; Usine C, Montréal, QC; Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University, Montréal, QC; The Image Centre, Toronto, ON; Angell Gallery, Toronto, ON; and Spin Gallery, Toronto, ON. She was a contributor to the Lisbon Triennial (2013) and 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2015).

Choi is the recipient of awards, grants, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation (2022–24), Canada Council for the Arts (2021), Asian American Arts Alliance (2022), Richard Rogers Fellowship (2019), MillerKnoll Foundation (2020–21), The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2015), Canadian Centre for Architecture (2016), and the Society of Architectural Historians (2015, 2020, 2024).

In 2019, Choi published Le Corbuffet (Prestel), a conceptual art project in the form of a cookbook that retools the genre of food photography to explore ideas about cultural consumption. The publication was nominated for a 2020 James Beard Foundation Award for Photography. Choi's photography commissions have appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Dazed and Confused, Le Monde, AnOther Magazine, AnOther Man, Elle Decor, Vice, and The New York Times Magazine. Her images for T: The New York Times Style Magazine were nominated for an ASME National Magazine Award in 2024.

Choi's writing has appeared in publications such as Art Papers, e-flux, Artforum, Harvard Design Magazine, and Perspecta, and books such as Reaper (JRP Ringier, 2015), Radical Pedagogies (The MIT Press, 2022), and Hippie Modernism (Walker Art Center, 2015). She is the co-editor of the books Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press, 2010) and Architecture Is All Over (Columbia Books, 2017).

She is the is the creator of Public Service (2023-), a YouTube series sponsored by the Ford Foundation that features BIPOC artists, designers, and scholars in conversations about catalyzing change in the cultural industries. In 2020, she created Office Hours (2020-), an artist-run, knowledge-sharing project by and for BIPOC cultural practitioners that has been attended by thousands of people representing the global majority in over 30 countries.

Choi holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and degrees in architectural history/theory and photography from Harvard University, Concordia University, and Toronto Metropolitan University. In 2022, she was a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art. She served as an Assistant Professor of Photography and Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University from 2008 to 2016, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 2016 to 2023.