/Panel/
From Backstage to Center Stage: How Women Cultural Workers Shape the Contemporary Art System
Role: Organizer
Time: 2026/3/21
Address: 110 Lafayette St #201, New York, NY 10013
From Backstage to Center Stage: How Women Cultural Workers Shape the Contemporary Art System examines how women practitioners are reshaping knowledge production, narrative formation, and institutional structures within today’s evolving art world. As digital infrastructures, media environments, and cross-platform circulation continue to transform artistic production and discourse, women working across writing, journalism, curating, platform building, and education are expanding the ways art is produced, interpreted, and communicated. Through cross-disciplinary practices that connect technology, media, identity, and public engagement, they play a critical role in constructing cultural meaning and sustaining the infrastructures of the art system. Yet this labor often remains unevenly recognized, situated between visibility and invisibility within institutional and discursive frameworks.
The panel is structured around two interconnected conversations. The first explores how women cultural workers shape artistic and institutional structures, focusing on writing, curation, media, and platform practices as forms of agency that construct narratives, organize resources, and mediate cultural understanding. The second considers the methodologies that underpin these practices, examining how embodied experience, cross-cultural positioning, technological mediation, and research-driven inquiry contribute to new modes of cultural production and articulation. Bringing together perspectives from art writing, journalism, digital platforms, and education, the discussion offers a critical reflection on how women’s cultural labor is transforming the contemporary art ecosystem and shaping its future trajectories.
Panelists
Jiayin Chen:
Jiayin Chen is a curator, writer, and cultural entrepreneur passionate about engaging with artists who utilize digital technologies, ranging from moving images, immersive media to NFTs.Chen is the founder of SCREEN, the first bilingual online art platform dedicated to digital art, established in 2014.
Pin-Hsuan Tseng:
Pin-Hsuan Tseng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art Education at Penn State University, with minors in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Curriculum & Instruction. Her scholarly work has been published in Research in Arts Education, Visual Arts Research, and in multiple edited book chapters. She has received numerous international recognitions, including the Art Education Research Institute (AERI) Honorable Mention Dissertation Award (2025), the Pennsylvania Art Education Association Fellows Clyde M. McGeary Scholarship (2024), and the Dr. John Roe Sustainability Impact Award (2024). Additional honors include the Ecology and Environment Interest Group Award from the National Art Education Association (2024), the a2ru Scholar Award (2024), the Dorothy Hughes Young Endowed Scholarship for Music and Art Education (2023–2025), the Penn State Student Leadership Scholarship (2023–2024), and Taiwan’s Outstanding Art Star in Teaching Award (2015).
Xintian Tina Wang:
Xintian Tina Wang is a journalist, cultural critic, and author whose work examines gender, sexuality, arts, business, and technology. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, NBC News, ARTnews, and other major outlets, amplifying underrepresented voices. Her reporting and documentary work have received recognition from the Gracie Awards and the Boston Short Film Festival, and she was named one of Gold House’s 2024 AAPI Journalists to Watch. Wang serves as President of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) New York Chapter, leading initiatives on media equity and community storytelling. She holds an MS in Journalism from Columbia University and a BS in Advertising from Boston University.
