A New York-based writer, Dawn Chan frequently contributes to the New York Times. You can also find her writing in ArtReview, the Atlantic.com, Bookforum, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, and the Village Voice. Currently core faculty at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies, Dawn has received a Warhol Arts Writers Grant, a Thoma Foundation writing award, and a Fulbright Grant. She also formerly wrote for Artforum, where she worked as an editor in the 2010s.

Dawn's writing has been anthologized in books ranging from Spectral Futures (Bloomsbury, 2026), to Science Fiction (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2020) to Intersubjectivities, vol. 4 (Sternberg Press, 2026). Her essays and texts appear in publications released by the Sharjah Biennial, the Taipei Biennial, the Okayama Arts Summit, and the New School's Vera List Center. As a speaker, Dawn has appeared at venues ranging from NYU and RISD to the Guggenheim Museum and Metrograph.

Occasionally, Dawn also moonlights as a curator. She worked as one of five co-curators for "Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future" at Tai Kwun Museum in Hong Kong. Dawn also curated artist Tommy Kha's solo 2023 show at Baxter St. Camera Club, which received press in the Amp, AnOther, the British Journal of Photography, Cultured, and the Times.

These days, Dawn is taking part in a personal challenge to stay gainfully employed as an art critic without flying for work. The hope is that the constraint will force experiments with weird, alternative modes of knowledge exchange that reduce carbon emissions but also keep things local. Read more here.