A New York–based writer, Dawn Chan frequently contributes art criticism to The New York Times. Her writing has also been published in ArtReview, the Atlantic, Bookforum, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, the Paris Review, Spike, and The Village Voice. In the 2010s, she worked as an editor at Artforum Magazine, and later as an assistant editor in the publications department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Formerly a visiting scholar at NYU’s Center for Experimental Humanities, Dawn has been a speaker at the Guggenheim Museum, Triple Canopy, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other venues. In 2019–2020, as part of a CCS Bard team led by Lauren Cornell, Dawn was a co-curator of Phantom Plane, Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future at Tai Kwun Museum. She also curated Ghost Bites, photographer Tommy Kha’s solo show at Baxter St. at CCNY at 2023.
Dawn’s writing has been anthologized in Intersubjectivity IV (Sternberg Press, forthcoming), Spectral Futures (Bloomsbury 2025), and Science Fiction (Whitechapel/MIT Press 2020), as well as in publications put forth by the Taipei Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, the Okayama Art Summit, and Hyundai Artlab, among other volumes. She is the recipient of a Warhol Arts Writers Grant, a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and a Fulbright Fellowship.
Her recent research focuses on East and Southeast Asian diasporas, digital worldbuilding, transpacific studies, and climate justice.