Alice Nien-pu Ko is a curator and writer based in New York whose research-driven, site-responsive practice moves across contemporary art, moving image, and transnational art histories. Her work examines how time-based media, myth, and disrupted archives shape historical consciousness, perception, and the collective imaginary. Through exhibitions, writing, and transregional collaborations, she engages the moving image as both a tool of inquiry and a medium of world-making, one capable of visualizing the spectral, the embodied, and the unseen.

Ko’s curatorial methodology emerges from a sustained engagement with cultural memory, Indigenous epistemologies, and expanded cinematic forms. She approaches exhibition-making as a space for translation between cosmologies, where art operates as an interface between the visible and the invisible. Drawing from anthropology, media theory, and spiritual inquiry, her projects construct layered environments in which sound, image, and ritual unfold as parallel modes of knowing.

Over the past decade, Ko has curated exhibitions and public programs across Asia, Europe, and North America, working within museums, biennials, and independent platforms. Her recent New York exhibitions Between Waves (The Brooklyn Rail, 2023–24) and A Dweller on Two Planets (Microscope Gallery, 2023) investigate oceanic worldviews, deep time, and speculative media through sound and cinema. She is currently developing Remote Viewing (MoNTUE, Taipei, 2026), a research-based exhibition exploring how artists use experimental film to render altered perception, psychic experience, and metaphysical consciousness.

From 2013 to 2022, Ko served as a curator at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA), where she co-curated major international exhibitions including Tony Oursler: Black Box (2021), the Pan-Austro-Nesian Arts Festival (2021), and SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2019), co-presented with the Mori Art Museum. Her solo curatorial project Tomb of the Soul, Temple, Machine and the Self (2018), presented in dialogue with Nude: Masterpieces from Tate, was nominated for the 17th Taishin Arts Award. Across these projects, Ko has continually examined how technology, spirituality, and embodiment intersect within the expanded field of moving-image art.

Beyond exhibition-making, she contributes to discourses on decolonial aesthetics, media archaeology, and cross-cultural art histories. She has presented her research at the International Convention of Asia Scholars and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference, and has written on artists including Shigeko Kubota, Tony Oursler, Rashid Johnson, Angel Otero, Chen Chieh-jen, Ho Tzu Nyen, and Jane Jin Kaisen. As an editor, she has overseen key publications such as Tony Oursler: Black Box, Comparisons and Intersections of Art Histories in Southeast Asia, and Surviving on Time: Curatorial Report from Asia, all of which trace emergent dialogues in experimental and transregional art practice.

Ko’s curatorial vision situates contemporary art as a medium for reimagining cultural and temporal boundaries. She is particularly interested in how archives, landscapes, and ritual can function as technologies for imagining speculative futures. Her exhibitions construct what she describes as “affective architectures of thought”—spaces in which viewers navigate between material and immaterial realities, between history and its possible afterlives.

By positioning art as a form of cultural mediation and imaginative repair, Ko contributes to a growing field of curators who approach the moving image not simply as representation but as a living method of understanding the world. Through her sustained commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration, philosophical depth, and sensory experience, Ko’s work continues to expand how we perceive time, memory, and the intertwined histories of global modernity.