Gloria Fan Duan
Gloria Fan Duan is an artist and educator whose work explores the poetic intersections of art, science, and technology. She obtained a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a 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. 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.
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.
Residency Project in Progress
The Fou Residency will serve as a foundational phase for a new branch of The Glass Garden, an ongoing project that explores the intersection of art, ecology, and preservation. The Glass Garden is in dialogue with archival and collection practices, and the artificial reconstruction that is often necessary for preservation or recollection of the past. Through replicatory sculptural techniques like mold making and casting, the series reflects on how botanical life can be fossilized into material memory, indexing both presence and loss within shifting ecosystems.
In this chapter, Gloria will focus on the ecotones of Tulum, Mexico. This region is a richly diverse web of habitats along the Caribbean coast where tropical forests, palm savannahs, wetlands, lagoons, mangroves, beaches, and dunes all converge. The transition between these environments form ecological threshold zones called “ecotones.” These shifting biota are shaped by ancient geologies and contemporary pressures. Each landscape offers its own sensorial language and ecological specificity, which she will explore through moldmaking and casting as well as drawing.
From July to August 2025, she explores and documents botanical specimens from Tulum’s varied ecosystems, with a particular focus on ecotone zones, or thresholds where one ecosystem merges into another. While based in Tulum, she will use a studio space to begin moldmaking and casting directly on site. These material processes will continue in New York City after the residency. The primary goal is the creation of molds from plant samples, an act of direct ecological engagement. During her residency, she plans to document and preserve as many unique specimens as possible from a wide range of ecotones in order to capture and consider the specificity and sensorial character of Tulum’s living thresholds.
Gloria Fan Duan’s residency is generously supported by NATL.
