Gabriella Daris

Gabriella Daris obtained her doctorate (PhD) in philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, London. Her doctoral thesis problematizes the instruction/institution dialectic in a 1960s context and critically examines the ontological distinctiveness, metaphysical importance, and social significance of Yoko Ono’s conceptual art. She works within a critical-theoretical tradition, with an art-historical focus on late modern, avant-garde, and contemporary art, dance and literature (European, North American and Japanese).

Formerly a critic at Blouin Artinfo and Modern Painters, she is the curator of Yoko Ono: Looking For… (2019) and the convenor of the first international symposium on Yoko Ono held jointly at the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University in 2019. In 2023, she designed an extracurricular philosophy of art course on the concepts of freedom and play in the work of Friedrich Schiller and Yoko Ono, which she delivered to state secondary schools across London. She has held Visiting lectureships at Yale University (2023), the University of Belgrade (2022), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and a Visiting Research Fellowship at Waseda University (2022).

Dr Daris's academic research and curatorial projects have been supported by: the Getty Foundation; the Henry Moore Foundation; the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation; the Japan Foundation; the Emily Harvey Foundation; the British Society of Aesthetics; the British Association for Japanese Studies; the Association for Art History; and the British Council.