Vera Mey is an art historian and independent curator. She was awarded her PhD from SOAS, University of London and is currently faculty of the Department of History of Art at the University of York. Her research looks at regionalist tendencies of Southeast Asian art during the Cold War eras in Cambodia, Indonesia and Singapore, paying particular attention to tensions of modernity and tradition, and intersections of racial plurality within regionalism. She was on the founding curatorial team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore led by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer where she led the Residencies programme which brought together artists from all over the world for a concentrated period of research. More recently as an independent curator she has co-curated and curated exhibitions in Bangkok, Berlin, New Zealand, Paris, Phnom Penh, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. This includes working on SUNSHOWER: Contemporary art from Southeast Asia 1980s to now (2017) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo which was the largest survey of Southeast Asian contemporary art to be exhibited. Most recently, she was Co-Artistic Director of the Busan Biennale 2024 looks at the intersection between notions of Pirate Enlightenment as articulated by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (2023) and how Buddhist Enlightenment particular to the context of South Korea. She hopes to expand on the above topics for future research looking at the relationship between art and anticapitalism.
She has been a Getty Foundation scholar as part of the cohorts for 'Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art' (2015 – 2016), and 'Art Schools of Asia' hosted out of the Asia Art Archive Hong Kong. Mey co-founded the scholarly journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia (National University of Singapore Press) and was part of the research colloquium 'The Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung' organised by the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Frankfurt, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California. She is currently working on the research project called 'Spectres of Bandung: a Political Imagination of Asia Africa'. Artistic Co-Director of the 2024 Busan Biennale in South Korea.
She has taught art history, curatorial studies and critical studies at several universities including Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland; Victoria University of Wellington; Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London; SOAS, University of London and was most recently Guest Professor at Städelschule, Frankfurt during the summer of the 2022/2023 academic year.
