Investigative Journalist and Author Suki Kim Named 2023-24 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College

Today, the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and Bard College's Human Rights Project named author Suki Kim as the 2023-24 recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism.

Established in 2014, the fellowship supports an annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within the CCS Bard graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The fellowship, which was fully endowed in 2022, represents a longstanding commitment by Bard College and the Keith Haring Foundation to support scholarship and creative practices at the intersection of art and activism.

Through her work as a journalist and author, Kim has provided unprecedented insights into one of the world's most secretive and dangerous dictatorships. Born in South Korea, Kim has been traveling to North Korea since 2002, where she has contributed groundbreaking reporting on the country to publications including The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. In 2011, Kim published The New York Times bestseller, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite (Crown, 2014), based on her experience living undercover in Pyongyang for six months with the country's future leaders during the final year of Kim Jong-il's reign. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the PEN Open Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Open Society Foundations fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant, an American Academy Berlin Prize, and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship at Harvard University.

“It is an honor to welcome Suki Kim to Bard, where I am sure she will inspire a new generation to act boldly in advancing human rights in their respective fields,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. “As a novelist and significantly as an investigative journalist, her work has led to real change in our world.”

“Suki Kim is at once a courageous risk-taker and a brilliant writer," said Thomas Keenan, Director of Bard's Human Rights Project. “That rare combination of political commitment and artistic eloquence is exactly what the Haring Fellowship was created to honor."  

Kim's appointment follows that of Haytham el-Wardany, the 2022-23 Haring Fellow. Additional details on the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism follow below, with more information on previous fellows found at ccsbard.edu.

Suki Kim is an investigative journalist, a novelist, and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea.

Kim's New York Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite (Crown, 2014) is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world's most secretive gulag nation during the final year of Kim Jong-il's reign. Her novel, The Interpreter (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003) was the PEN Open Book Award winner and a PEN Hemingway Prize finalist. She is currently working on her next nonfiction book The Prince and the Revolutionary: Children of War (W.W. Norton), which was shortlisted for a 2022 Lukas Prize work-in-progress, given by Columbia University School of Journalism and Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Kim's writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Her TED Talk on her experiences living undercover in North Korea has drawn millions of viewers. She has appeared in media around the world including CNN, BBC, CBS, NBC, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Kim served as a Ferris Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Princeton University in 2017.

Founded in 1990, CCS Bard is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside an extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty, and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art and its social significance.

The Human Rights Project, founded at Bard in 1999, introduced the first interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program in Human Rights in the United States. The Project maintains a special interest in freedom of expression and the public sphere, and through teaching, research, and public programs is committed to exploring the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and representational dimensions of human rights discourse. Since 2009, the Human Rights Project has collaborated with CCS Bard on the development of seminars, workshops, research projects, and symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts. While academic in nature, this research and teaching draws heavily on the realm of practice, involving human rights advocates, artists, and curators.

Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes during his life. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and communities impacted by systemic inequity. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.

The Keith Haring Foundation gives grants to not-for-profit entities that engage in charitable and educational activities. In accordance with Keith's wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of young people, and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection. The Foundation additionally maintains a collection of Haring's art and archives and funds exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the artist's work and philosophy. www.haring.com.

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