Suki Kim Named Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) and the Human Rights Project at Bard College announced today that investigative journalist and author Suki Kim has been selected as the 2023–24 recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism, an annual award that provides a scholar, activist, or artist with the opportunity to teach and conduct research at the school. “It is an honor to welcome Suki Kim to Bard, where I am sure she will inspire a new generation to act boldly in advancing human rights in their respective fields,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of CCS Bard, in a statement. “As a novelist and significantly as an investigative journalist, her work has led to real change in our world.”RelatedHELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION SUED FOR “DESTROYING” PAINTER’S LEGACYBMA CREATES PAID INTERNSHIPS HONORING VALERIE MAYNARD The South Korean–born Kim has since 2002 reported firsthand on North Korea for publications includingHarper’s, theNew Republic,theNew Yorker, theNew York Review of Books. She is the only writer to have lived undercover in the totalitarian dictatorship, which she did in 2011, spending six months in Pyongyang in the waning days of Kim Jong-il’s rule.

She detailed her experiences among the country’s future leaders in the 2014New York TimesbestsellerWithout You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite.Kim’s 2003 novelThe Interpreterwon her the PEN Open Book Award; she is additionally the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, aMacDowell Fellowship, an Open Society Foundations Fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant, an American Academy Berlin Prize, and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard University, among other accolades. “Suki Kim is at once a courageous risk-taker and a brilliant writer,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard’s Human Rights Project, in a statement. “That rare combination of political commitment and artistic eloquence is exactly what the Haring Fellowship was created to honor.”.