Nina Horisaki-Christens (Ph.D., Columbia University) is an art historian, curator and translator. She researches the intersection of art, media, urbanism, translation, and social engagement in Japan, Asia, and the Asian diaspora. Her current book project traces the local discourse and transnational networks of the 1970s Tokyo-based collective Video Hiroba.

Horisaki-Christens was a 2023-24 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, a summer 2023 Anne van Biema Fellow at the National Museum of Asian Art, a 2023 participant in the Global Asias Summer Institute at Penn State. Previously she served as a Burke Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, a Fulbright Graduate Fellow and Visiting Researcher at Sophia University in Tokyo, and a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. She has also taught at Fordham University and New Mexico State University. Her curatorial work includes extensive consultation and contributions to Collaborative Cataloging Japan’s 2024 exhibition “Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US 1960s-1970s,” assisting with the Japan Society’s 2019 exhibition “Made in Tokyo: Architecture & Living, 1964/2020,” serving as Research Assistant for “Gutai: Splendid Playground” at the Guggenheim Museum, working as Assistant Curator and Interim Programs Manager at Art in General, and various independent projects. In 2021 she served as Lead Researcher for Collaborative Cataloging Japan’s “Interrogating Ecology: 1970s Media and Art in Japan” project. Horisaki-Christens has contributed to publications by the Tate Modern, Art Tower Mito, MoMA, the Mori Art Museum, ArtAsiaPacific, and Millennium Film Journal, among others.

Selected Publications

  • “Between Galapagos and Archipelagos: Institutional Tensions in Japanese Contemporary Art,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 11, no. 1 (Spring 2025)
  • “Video as World Mandala: Nakajima Ko’s Animaker, Aniputer, and Cosmic Video,” Leonardo 56, no. 6 (Dec 2024) https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02587
  • “The City Refracted: Yamaguchi Katsuhiro’s Applied Media Theory,” in Electric Dream: Art and Technology 1950s-1980s [exhibition catalogue], Tate Modern, London, 2024 (expected Nov 2024)
  • Review of Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus at Japan Society, NY, Millennium Film Journal 80, October 2024
  • Review of Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art, by Miryam Sas, caa.reviews, December 6, 2023, DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2023.76
  • “Fujiko Nakaya Friends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary,” Signals: The Politics of Video [exhibition catalogue], Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2023
  • “Friends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary and the Knot of Fujiko Nakaya’s Early Video Practice,” Millennium Film Journal, special issue ed. by Barbara London, Oct 15, 2022
  • “Shiraga Kazuo, Challenging Mud (Doru ni idomu),” Smarthistory.org, July 2, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/shiraga-kazuo-challenging-mud/
  • “Video as Biological Cycle: Nakajima Ko’s Ecological Vision,” Collaborative Cataloguing Japan (online, republished from Keio University Art Center pamphlet with minor edits), December 2020 
  • “When Video Promised a Sci-Fi Future,” ArtAsiaPacific, March 2019 
  • “Nakaya Fujiko’s Contributions to Early Japanese Video,” Resistance of Fog: Fujiko Nakaya [solo exhibition catalogue, curated by Junya Yamamine], Art Tower Mito, Japan, 2019
  • “Maintenance and Dependency,” Maintenance Required (exhibition catalogue), Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 2013
  • “Erratic Anthropologies” in Performa09: Back to Futurism. New York: Performa, 2011