Carson Chan

Carson Chan is Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Architecture and Design Museum Helsinki, where he shapes the Museum's intellectual vision and oversees its exhibitions, collections, publications, research, and audience engagement.

From 2021, he served as the inaugural Director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he was also Curator of Architecture and Design. At MoMA, he championed critical thinking around the built and natural environment through public programs, scholarly conferences, publications, and collaborations with the learning and engagement team. His widely acclaimed exhibition Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism (2023) brought vital attention to American architectural responses to the environmental crises of the twentieth century.

Chan's curatorial practice began with the co-founding of PROGRAM in Berlin with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga in 2006, an experimental project space and residency that fostered cross-disciplinary dialogue. This led to large-scale curatorial projects, including co-curating the 4th Marrakech Biennale (2012) with Nadim Samman, which featured 37 new commissions, and serving as Executive Curator of the Biennial of the Americas in Denver (2013). Across these platforms, Chan prompted artists and architects to produce site-responsive works that grounded global discourses in local contexts.

A prolific writer, Chan's work appears in publications including Art Papers, Frieze, Log, Texte zur Kunst, and 032c, where he previously served as Editor-at-Large. He has contributed essays to monographs on Monica Bonvicini, Julian Charrière, Aleksandra Domanović, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Barkow Leibinger, among others.

Chan holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and a Master's in Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His doctoral research at Princeton University focuses on environmentalism and the architecture of postwar public aquariums in the United States.