Biography
Iris Luo is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator, and educator from China. She explores the intersection of ontological design and knowledge justice with cultures, technology, and ancestral memories. From digital archiving to participatory action research, her work focuses on knowledge production through intra-action among pluriversal worldviews and challenges the bias of cognition. Using storytelling and visual/multi-sensory narratives as tools, her goal is to imagine and nurture alternative pedagogies and respectful ethnography that prioritize land/water-based agency by bringing trans-local collaboration into cyberspace that is interconnected within the global.
From 2024 to 2025, Iris is curating an exhibition titled "The Making of Barkcloth: Place, Gender, and Trans-Local Community," with the support of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection's Charlotte A. Jirousek Fellowship and the Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities, to work on the medium of barkcloth, which traces the migration of Austroniean-speaking ancestors from Maritime Southeast Asia to Oceania, looking at the material through both cultural and scientific lenses. As part of this curatorial practice, she prototyped a digital humanities project of a textile database, "Visually the Barkcloth", to support the collective learning experience of historical barkcloth by bringing in the voices of multiple local communities.
From 2023 to 2024, Iris is a Research Fellow at the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR) as part of the theme year of "The After School". Prior to her time at Cornell, from 2020 to 2023, Iris conducted research on art as intervention in rural China and the cultural ecology of Maya textiles in Guatemala.
Research Keywords: Social Design, Design Theory, Experimental Ethnography, Digital Archiving, Action Research, Knowledge Production, Information Data System, Semiotics and Narrative, and Generative Learning (Workshop). In the context of Postcolonial Museology, Knowledge Justice, and Social Innovation.
I practice curation and study curatorial strategy through the lens of historiography to social design. I focus on the collaboration between grassroots collectives with/in institutional settings and alternative knowledge production through action. Community engagement and civic pedagogy are at the core of my curation.
In the context of museology and anthropology, I study the application of indigenous philosophies to post-development theories and place-based design. By seeing tradition in transition rather than passively in the past, I study how to preserve intangible cultural heritage, such as craftsmanship, by connecting the local artisan communities with a global audience.
Trans-locality is the main framework I use, and I am currently working on the theory of "the Ocean as Paradigm" to ontologically shift the narrative of world-building by prioritizing relationality as the essence of existence and rethink the shape of a possible cultural collective.
Y. Luo, I., and M. Leitao, R. (2024) Pluriversal Design in One Situated Place: An Approach Rooted in the interface between the Local and the Global, in Gray, C., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.572
2023, M.A., Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College
2021, M.F.A., Theatre Management & Producing, Columbia University
2018, B.A., Finance, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics