Aric Chen

Aric Chen is an American architecture curator and writer. In 2025, he was appointed director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation.

Previously, he served a four-year tenure as the general and artistic director of Het Nieuwe Instituut in the Netherlands, the national museum and archive for architecture, design, and digital culture.

Biography

Born in Chicago, United States, to Taiwanese parents, Chen studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he pursued a bachelor's degree in architecture and a bachelor's degree in anthropology. He then continued his studies at Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the Parsons School of Design, where he earned a master's degree in history of design.

Before transitioning to curating, he worked as a journalist. where he served as a professor and the founding director of the Curatorial Lab at the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai. In 2010, Chen was appointed the first Creative Director of the Beijing Design Week. There, he oversaw the establishment of the new museum's design and architecture collection and programme.

In 2021, he was appointed general and artistic director of Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture, based in Rotterdam. Four years later, he served as an ambassador for the inaugural cycle of the Ammodo Architecture Awards.

Exhibitions

2021: X is Not a Small Country: Unravelling the Post-Global Era. Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology, Lisbon 2022-23: Urban Cosmologies. 9th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture 2023: Arata Isozaki: In Formation. Power Station of Art, Shanghai

Publications

2016: Brazil Modern. The Monacelli Press, United States