The role of the Associate Director at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) is to help shape the intellectual content of the program, and to maintain and enhance its pedagogical, artistic, and scholarly range. To this end, the Associate Director leads a series of theory seminars and coordinates weekly presentations with visiting artists and scholars. The Associate Director meets regularly with all the participants in the program—Studio, Critical Studies, and Curatorial—and oversees the ISP capstone for each division: a curatorial exhibition, a studio exhibition, and the critical studies symposium. The Associate Director also acts as a liaison with universities, art schools, and other academic and cultural institutions, as well as with various departments in the Museum, including Curatorial, Communications, Education, and Publications.
Gregg Bordowitz, the Director of the ISP, created the new position and welcomes the new Associate director—“Sara Nadal-Melsió is an extraordinary scholar and teacher, plus a skilled organizer and curator. She arrives in the new position as the ISP’s first Associate Director with a deep understanding of the history of the program and wonderfully fresh ideas. Her knowledge and experience will carry the ISP forward as a leading educational platform. She already is incisively taking the ISP in directions necessary to maintain the relevance, enthusiasm, curiosity, and experimentalism that are the fundamental attributes of the ISP.” As she has put it, acknowledging the ISP’s storied past and its open future, “The sociality of a sustained conversation embedded in the ISP’s forty-year living legacy of alternative pedagogies—part of a memory transmitted intergenerationally and internationally, and housed in an artist’s studio and home—intensifies a collective experience of making and of study.”
Sara Nadal-Melsió is a Catalan writer, curator, and teacher committed to collaborative thinking, alternative literacies, and collective learning practices. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, SOMA in Mexico City, and New York University, and has been a writer-in-residence at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Her essays have appeared in various academic journals, edited volumes, and museum catalogues. Nadal-Melsió is the co-author of Alrededor de/Around, and the editor of two special issues on cinema, The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism and The Militant Image: Temporal Disturbances of the Political Imagination. To accompany a survey exhibition on Allora & Calzadilla that she co-curated at the Fundació Tápies in Barcelona, Nadal-Melsió wrote the book essay, To Be All Ears, To Be in the World: Acoustic Relation in Allora & Calzadilla, and edited a companion volume on the Puerto Rican crisis, A Modest Proposal: Puerto Rico’s Crucible. She is the co-author of Politically Red (MIT, 2023), with Eduardo Cadava, and her book Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Concept is forthcoming from Zone Books.
