Independent
Study Program

In addition to the general application, all Studio Program applicants must also submit examples of recent work with brief descriptions of media and scale. Please do not submit more than 15 examples. 

If submitting film or video examples, please include these as links (hosted on a website, Vimeo, YouTube or other platform). Film and video submissions should not exceed 30 minutes. If linking to a longer program, please indicate timestamps or sections to be viewed.  

In addition to the general application, all Critical Studies applicants must also include:

• Writing sample (no more than 15 pages)
• An individual research project proposal (no more than 4 pages)

In addition to the general application, all Curatorial Program applicants must also include:

• Writing sample (no more than 15 pages)
• An exhibition proposal (no more than 2 pages)

Those eligible for participation in the ISP include graduate students, candidates for advanced postgraduate degrees, undergraduates with a demonstrated capacity for advanced scholarship, or those who have recently completed formal academic study. The ISP welcomes international applications and can provide a J-1 cultural visa if needed.

The ISP provides studios or workspaces for all participants in a facility that includes areas to gather and share meals. The curriculum of the program is designed around weekly seminars with visiting artists, scholars and members of faculty as well as film screenings and readings. 

Participants are expected to attend all seminars and events, as well as work in assigned studios or workspaces at the facility. If you are accepted into the ISP, you are expected to be an active participant in the community of practitioners gathered at the program. There are no remote options for seminars, visits, or events, unless pandemic conditions and/or health concerns require alternative planning. 

Credit may be granted by the students’ home universities for work done in the ISP. Most cooperating schools grant twelve to sixteen credits for participation in the program. Students need to make the necessary arrangements to receive credit.

The 2024 application is now closed.

If you have further inquiries, please email: laura_busby@whitney.org

There is no tuition to study at the ISP.

After a preliminary review of applications by a five person committee chaired by the director, arrangements will be made to interview final candidates.

ISP Director Gregg Bordowitz is a committed teacher who, among many other accomplishments, spent thirty years as a visiting faculty member with the ISP. For twenty-five years, Bordowitz taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), acting first as a professor and then chair of the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department. From 2013 to 2023, he served as the inaugural director of SAIC’s Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program. An ISP alumnus from the 1985/86 class, Bordowitz succeeded founding ISP director Ron Clark, who retired in June 2023. Clark’s leadership and vision over five decades supported generations of artists, curators, and critics and made the ISP one of the most respected and coveted programs in the world.

Bordowitz is also a renowned filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney, New Museum, Artists Space, The Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Tate Modern, among others. His work was the subject of a traveling retrospective spanning thirty years of activity—Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well—first organized by the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, in 2018. In the 1980s, Bordowitz focused his creative practice on responding to the AIDS crisis. He organized and documented numerous protests against government inaction and advocated for health education and harm reduction as a member of the groundbreaking AIDS activist group ACT UP. He also served as a founding member of the 1980s video/film collectives Testing the Limits and Diva TV.

“My engagement with the ISP, as a participant and then faculty for over thirty years, shapes my ongoing education as an artist and a teacher. Study is a way of life. Teaching is the art of learning. The teacher teaches learning, as learning teaches the students and teaches the teacher to teach. This is an ongoing process of continually renewing amazement.”

ISP Associate Director 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), and her book Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Concept is forthcoming from Zone Books.

“My role as the Associate Director is to help shape the intellectual content of the program, maintaining and enhancing its pedagogical, artistic, and scholarly range. To this end, I lead a series of theory seminars and coordinate weekly presentations with visiting artists and scholars. I meet regularly with participants in the Studio, Critical Studies, and Curatorial programs and oversee capstone events—a curatorial exhibition, a studio exhibition, and the critical studies symposium. I also act as liaison with universities, art schools, and other academic and cultural institutions, as well as various departments of the Whitney Museum, including Curatorial, Communications, Education, and Publications.”

Laura Busby (she/her) was named Manager of the ISP in 2023. Previously, she served as Coordinator in the director’s office at the Whitney Museum from 2021 to 2023. As Coordinator, she supported then-Director Adam Weinberg with the renovation efforts to transform Roy Lichtenstein’s previous home and studio and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation into a permanent home for the ISP.

As a member of the ISP team, Busby works closely with the Director and Associate Director, Whitney Museum staff, and ISP interns, and has broad responsibility for all administrative aspects of the ISP. Busby received her undergraduate degree in art history from the University of British Columbia in Canada and earned her MA in visual arts administration from New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellows:

Nooshin Askari
Paige Bradley
Dahlia Bloomstone
Cheeny Celebrado-Royer
Rhea Dillon
Niloufar Emamifar
Valentina Jager
Ash Moniz
Daniel Melo Morales 
Iulia Nistor
Pegah Pasalar
Chantal Peñalosa
Alex Schmidt
Julia Taszycka
misra walker

2023 catalogue
2022 catalogue
2022 catalogue (screen readable)
2020 catalogue
2019 exhibition images
2018 catalogue
2017 exhibition images
2017 poster
2016 poster
2014 poster
2013 poster
2012 poster

Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Program Fellows:

Joanna Evans
Sahar Khraibani
Stella Liantonio
Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov
Adrienne Oliver
Stephen Woo

Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Program Fellows:

Kennedy Jones
Tamara Khasanova
Ntshadi Mofokeng
Beatriz Ortega Botas

Alex Alberro
Nora Alter
Emily Apter
Carol Armstrong
Homi Bhabha
Gregg Bordowitz
Benjamin Buchloh
Matthew Buckingham
Judith Butler
Jonathan Crary
Thomas Crow
Rosalyn Deutsche
Mark Dion
Silvia Federici
Hal Foster
Andrea Fraser 
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Coco Fusco
Jennifer González
Isabelle Graw
Renée Green
Cassandra Guan
Hans Haacke
David Harvey
Sharon Hayes
Thomas Hirschhorn
Jenny Holzer
Chrissie Iles
Alfredo Jaar
Emily Jacir
Gareth James
Isaac Julien
Geeta Kapur
Mary Kelly
Silvia Kolbowski
Miwon Kwon
Louise Lawler
Park McArthur
Tom McDonough
Kobena Mercer
Chantal Mouffe
Laura Mulvey
Mark Nash
Molly Nesbit
Christiane Paul
Adrian Piper
Yvonne Rainer
Martha Rosler
Andrew Ross
Gayatri Spivak
Hito Steyerl
Anthony Vidler
Fred Wilson
Yes Men
Soyoung Yoon