Profile
Lydia Matthews is a Brooklyn and Athens-based curator, writer, professor in the Fine Arts program at Parsons and founding director of the Curatorial Design Research Lab, which spans various university divisions across The New School. Trained in contemporary and modern art history at University of California, Berkeley and the University of London’s Courtauld Institute, her work explores how contemporary artists, artisans and designers foster critical democratic debates and intimate community interactions in the public sphere, often in response to a variety of urgent global and local conditions in their daily lives. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and exhibition catalogs, and she has lectured internationally on socially-engaged art, craft and design practices. Her curatorial projects in New York, the Post-Soviet region, Turkey and Southern Europe include exhibitions, participatory walking events, community-based urban festivals, and multidisciplinary pedagogical exchanges addressing ecological and social sustainability. Commissioned by Fulbright, CEC Artslink, Open Society Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Emre Senan Foundation and the US Embassy in the Republic of Georgia, she has curated participatory projects within Artisterium International Art Exhibition (Tbilisi, 2017, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2008), Batumi Backyards Project (Batumi, Georgia 2013, 2012), Dietski Dom Orphanage and Tengri Umai Gallery and Akkol /Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2015, 2016), Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room (Brooklyn, 2014), Souzy Tros Art Canteen (Athens, Greece, 2013), Kuad Gallery (Istanbul, 2012), Benaki Museum Pireos Annex (2011), Byzantine Museum (Athens, 2008) Byzantine Museum (Athens, 2008), Art Caucasus International (Tbilisi, 2007, 2005). Her walking projects have been featured in NeMe Arts Centre (Limossol, Cyprus, 2017), Ca’Foscari University (Venice, Italy, 2017) and The Milena Principle’s “Made of Walking Festival” (2016, Delphi, Greece.) She is online at: www.lydiamatthews.com