Cultural Advising

Dr. Les Joynes (US) is an arts and cultural diplomacy specialist based in New York. He is recipient of the 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award and was posted as Senior Scholar in Art and Performance at the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts in New Delhi where he led research on India visual and performative cultures in Delhi, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Nagaland and Sri Lanka.

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.

Sharing his time between the US, Europe and Asia since 1983, Dr. Joynes is also recipient US Department of State, American Arts Incubator ZERO1: Art and Technology Artist, San Francisco, CA, Fulbright Hays US Public Diplomacy China Award, Taiwan Ministry of Education (MOE) Huayu Grant, National Cheng Kung University, Train Fellowship, University of the Arts London Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity & Nation, Fulbright Hays US Public Diplomacy Award for Mongolia, Edwin Austin Abbey Fellowship, National Design Museum, New York, Bauhaus Foundation Fellow, Dessau, Germany, Nordic Artists Center Fellowship, Norway, the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture Scholar (Monbusho), Tokyo, Japan, Erasmus Scholarship, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts, Paris, France and the King Sturge Prize, London.

Curating since 1994, Joynes served on the curatorial team of first Taipei Biennial "Site of Desire" in 1998. He is founder of the Inclusive Biennial which explores multinational themes of social order, gender, race and identity. His writing and artwork has 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).

He is professor of Record for Renmin University’s course on Modern and Contemporary Art History and has taught Arts entrepreneurship at Peking University and lectured at University of Cambridge, Teachers College, 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 is invited as a visiting professor at the Royal University of Bhutan.

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; MBA from California State University and M.Sc from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences. He serves on the Museum Committee of the College Arts Association and is member of the American Association of Art Museums. Dr. Joynes is a member of the International Coaching Federation and the Institute of Coaching Affiliate of Harvard Medical School, the American Alliance of Art Museums, the International Leadership Association and member of the Museum Committee at College Arts Association.