Gloria Fan Duan is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, painting, new media, and installation. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design of Painting (B.F.A.) in 2015 and Art and Technology/Sound Practices from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (M.F.A. ) in 2020.  Gloria Fan Duan currently serves on the faculty at The New School at Parsons School of Design (New York)  and Pratt Institute (New York). Gloria Fan Duan’s practice engages ecological and cultural thresholds across geographies as a way of exploring how we locate ourselves within stratified and shifting worlds. She has exhibited internationally at venues and festivals including Ars Electronica (2020), Currents New Media Festival (2025/2023), Digerati Experimental Media Festival (2020), and Art Basel (2022). While engaging globally, she continues to prioritize local and community art spaces. Reviewed in The Washington Post, her first solo exhibition, Mobius Wave, was presented at Hillyer International Arts & Artists (2017) in the Washington, D.C. area. Since then, she has cultivated a global community through collaborative and commissioned projects, including The Bonsai Paradox with the Chicago Botanic Garden (2019) and The Pursuit of Harmony with La Prairie and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (2021–2022), which was featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. She has also received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Interlace Grant (2024/2023) and held fellowships at Pratt Institute (2023/2022/2021) and the NARS Foundation (2025). 

Gloria Fan Duan’s studio and laboratory based practice considers the aesthetic connections between nature and technology. Using various forms of technological augmentation including digital and biotechnology practices, she renders uncanny instances where beauty overrides naturalism. Trajectories that exist as pure speculation, like death or the future, remain elusive due to the inherent limitations of the human experience. By creating a visual vocabulary to depict ideas beyond the scope of human perception, her works speculate on impossible realities and unseen worlds. These simulacral approximations often fuse the organic and synthetic. Her work serves to understand the subjectivity of how realities emerge as well as their emotional undercurrents.

Biography

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