Gloria Fan Duan
Residency Project in Progress
Gloria Fan Duan is an artist and educator whose work explores the poetic intersections of art, science, and technology. Her interdisciplinary practice is grounded in process-driven inquiry. Conceptual frameworks arise through craft and experimentation where aesthetic research often manifests as sculpture, painting, new media, and installation. Drawing from biotechnology experimentation, horticultural arts, and the visual languages of still life and landscape painting, Duan investigates the tension between fragility and permanence through how we control, care for, and see ourselves reflected in the natural world. Her work engages with artistic and scientific attempts to augment, preserve, and reimagine nature. Organic and synthetic materials are often conflated to imitate each other, foregrounding the emotional and existential dimensions of such inquiries.
Duan’s practice engages ecological and cultural thresholds across geographies as a way of exploring how we locate ourselves within stratified and shifting worlds. Through collaboration, exhibition, and other context-specific projects, she investigates the tensions and poetics of place, dislocation, and becoming. In doing so, her practice has developed international visibility. She has exhibited internationally at venues such as Ars Electronica, Currents New Media Festival, Digerati Experimental Media Festival, and Art Basel in Basel. While engaging globally, she still continues to prioritize local and community art spaces. Reviewed in The Washington Post, her first solo show, Mobius Waves, was in her hometown at Hillyer International Arts & Artist in the Washington, D.C. area. Since then, she has cultivated a global community through select collaborative and commissioned projects, including The Bonsai Paradox with the Chicago Botanic Garden, and an international campaign with La Prairie and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, which was featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. She has also received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Interlace Grant and held fellowships at Pratt Institute and the NARS Foundation.
Her academic background, beginning with biotechnology studies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, followed by a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Art and Technology/Sound Practices from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, continues to shape her aesthetic vision through the lens of science and technology. Duan currently teaches at both Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute, where her pedagogy is rooted in the same values that drive her artistic practice: systems thinking, material experimentation, and a critical relationship to emerging technologies.
