Joynes & Company

Art Advising and Curating

Dr. Les Joynes (US) is an arts scholar, critic and public speaker based in New York and New Delhi. A graduate of Goldsmiths London he is curating, advising and writing on catalogues and press. As Fulbright-Nehru Senior Fellow at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, Dr. Joynes examines South Asian arts through performance and ritual. A Visiting Scholar in the Department of Art History and Archeology on the Columbia University Visitng Scholar and Scientist Program, he explored the future of museums.

Curating since 1994 he served on the curatorial team of first Taipei Biennial "Sites of Desire" in 1998 and has curated and produced exhibitions and performances in the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Singapore, Mongolia, China and upcoming India. He is founder of the Inclusive Biennial which explores multinational themes of social organization including gender, race and identity. His writing and artworks have featured in Art in America, Flash Art, Art Monthly London, Commons and Sense Japan, NHK Television Japan and the Journal for Artistic Research. Recent publications include “The Artist-centric model in museums” published in Looking to New Institutional Models: China’s Cultural Landscape by Mid-Century, Long Museum Shanghai. See writing samples (here).

Bringing thirty-five years of global experience he is building strategies that support museums, foundations and cultural institutions in realizing their creative vision. In addition to serving multinational clients including 3M, Du Pont, General Electric, Dow, Bayer and General Motors, he has conducted museum research for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and lectured on the future of exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, the Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing, and the Long Museum in Shanghai. Serving as a Leadership Coach at Columbia Business School, he introduced a museum leadership coaching to the Yale Center for British Art in 2019.

He teaches Modern and Contemporary art history and multi-media experiential practices at Renmin University in Beijing and has lectured at University of Cambridge, Teachers College, Peking University Institute of Cultural Industries, University of California Santa Barbara, University of the Arts London (UAL), University of Coventry, and the Bard-Smolny Program in St Petersburg. He is visiting faculty at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Arts at Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal and the Royal University of Bhutan.

Trained in both arts and administration, Dr. Joynes holds a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London; MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London; Masters in Fine Art from Musashino Art University, Tokyo; PhD from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, UK; Post-Doctorate in Fine Art from the School of Art and Communications at University of São Paulo, Brazil; and M.Sc from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences and was Fellow at the University of the Arts London Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN). He is recipient of the US Department of State ACMS Fellowship for his research on International Education and the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award. He serves on the Museum Committee of the College Arts Association and is member of the American Association of Art Museums he has coached academics and artists at at CAA conferences. Les is a member of the ICF and IOC Affiliate of Harvard Medical School, the American Alliance of Art Museums, and member of the Museum Committee at College Arts Association.