Duygu Demir

Duygu Demir (b. 1985) is an art historian and curator with a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests include global modernisms, exhibition histories, transnational encounters, and moments of confluence between art and architecture, in addition to contemporary artistic practice, especially of the non-Western kind. Currently, she is teaching in the Department of Culture and Tourism’s Teaching Artist Fellowship program in Abu Dhabi, and working on her book manuscript on articulations of modern painting from the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. 

Between 2023-2025, Demir was the curator of the Art Gallery and Research Assistant Professor in the Humanities Division at NYU Abu Dhabi. There, she co curated Between the Tides: A Gulf Quinquennial (2024-2025) and presented Entrusted Ground (2022), a performance and installation developed around artworks by Gözde İlkin, together with choreographer Aslı Öztürk and musician Berke Can Özcan in Istanbul. In 2022-2023, she was Assistant Professor of Art History at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey. Before her graduate studies, she worked as a programmer at SALT in Istanbul. In addition to SALT (Ankara and Istanbul), she curated exhibitions at IMALAT-HANE (2023, Bursa), artSümer (2021-22, İstanbul), MIT’s Keller Gallery (Cambridge, MA, 2017), Arter (2016, Istanbul) and Tate Modern (2011, London). While at SALT, she co curated the archival exhibition DuFrom England with love, İsmail Saray (2014), the retrospective A Promised Exhibition - Gülsün Karamustafayg (2013), and the inaugural exhibition I am not a studio artist (2011), a retrospective of the late Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. She also worked on numerous solo and group exhibitions and accompanying public programs including uRabih Mroué (2014), subREAL (2013), Hassan Khan (2012), İstanbul Eindhoven SALTVanAbbe: Post ‘89 (2012), and Modern Essays: Across the Slope - Ahmet Öğüt  (2011).

Her academic writing has appeared in Art Margins (2014), Thresholds (2018), both from MIT Press, as well as Art Journal (2019). Her upcoming essays will be published in anthologies by Yale University Press, American University of Beirut, and Cambridge University Press. She has edited and co-edited artist monographs, including İsmail Saray (2018, SALT), Room of Rhythms-Cevdet Erek (2012, Walther König), and I am not a Studio Artist (SALT, 2011). She also writes essays, articles and reviews on contemporary art for catalogues, magazines, and online platforms, both in Turkey and abroad.

She has a combined BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Columbia University in New York.

Photo: courtesy NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery