Miwon Kwon trained in architecture as an undergraduate then received a M.A. in photography (both at UC Berkeley), before completing her Ph.D. in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University in 1998. She joined the faculty at UCLA to teach contemporary art history (post-1945) in the same year. Along the way, she helped to curate several exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, was a founding editor and publisher of Documents, a journal of art, culture, and criticism (1992-2004), and defined her area of research and writings to encompass several disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, public art, and urban studies. She is the author of One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002) as well as numerous essays on the practices of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Marclay, Ana Mendieta, Do-Ho Suh, Mark Dion, Gabriel Orozco, Jimmie Durham, Christian Philipp Müller, Josiah McElheny, among others. She received a Scholars Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in 2003-04 and is currently at work on two new book-length projects, one on the art and the city, and the other on the problems of exchange. She is Graduate Advisor for 2005-07.
