Duygu Demir (b. Ankara, 1985) is an art historian and curator with a PhD from MIT titled A Syncretic Modernism: Articulations of Painting in Turkey 1933-1964. Her research has been supported by various grants from MIT in addition to a dissertation research fellowship from Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. She is interested in modern and contemporary art, especially but not exclusively of the non-Western variety. Her research topics include non-Western modernisms, exhibition histories, transnational encounters, and moments of confluence between art and architecture. She has been invited to act as a guest critic in art and architecture studio programs at both MIT and Yale University.

She has been researching Turkey’s modernist buildings that evidence the heritage of the local iteration of the mid-century phenomenon synthèse des arts, when architects and artists collaborated on building projects both small and large, funded by the state as well as privately. She works with photographers to document mosaics, ceramics, and murals --a sporadic project supported by the Faruk Sade Art Fund in Ankara for the past few years.

Before her graduate studies, Demir worked as a programmer at SALT in Istanbul. While there, she co-curated the archival exhibition From England with love, İsmail Saray (2014), the retrospective A Promised Exhibition - Gülsün Karamustafa (2013) and the inaugural exhibition I am not a studio artist (2011), a retrospective of the late Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. She also worked on numerous solo and group exhibitions and accompanying public programs including Rabih Mroué (2014), subREAL (2013), Hassan Khan (2012), İstanbul Eindhoven SALTVanAbbe: Post ‘89 (2012) and Modern Essays: Across the Slope - Ahmet Öğüt (2011). In 2011, she co-curated I Decided not to Save the World with Kyla McDonald, a group exhibition which was on view at Tate Modern in 2011 and traveled to SALT in 2012. More recently, she collaborated with SALT again on Exhibit, a monthly talk series investigating the heritage of world fairs on exhibition-making (2018-2019). Flow Through, a solo presentation of the work of Turkish-American artist Bahar Yürükoğlu opened at Arter Space for Art in Istanbul in March 2016.  Projected Architectures, an irregular and peripatetic program of moving images that engage with the built environment had its first iteration at MIT’s Keller Gallery in the fall of 2017. This year, she has worked on solo presentations of work by Deniz Aktaş and Gözde İlkin, both for artSümer in Istanbul (2022).

Demir's academic writing has appeared in Art Margins (2014), Thresholds (2018), both from MIT Press, as well as Art Journal (2019). She also writes articles and reviews on contemporary art for magazines and online platforms, including Argonotlar, Art Asia Pacific, Art Papers, Art Unlimited, Broadsheet, and Ibraaz. She was one of the authors of Art Cities of the Future: Avant-Gardes of the 21st Century (Phaidon, 2013), nominator and contributor for Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing (Phaidon, 2013) as well as editor of Room of Rhythms-Cevdet Erek (2012, Walther König) and I am not a Studio Artist (SALT, 2011). Most recently, she co-edited a monograph on conceptualist İsmail Saray that was published in 2018 by SALT. She has written artist entries and essays for various exhibition catalogs, including the 2019 Venice Biennial May You Live in Interesting Times (2019), Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish and Indian Highlights from NYU’S Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019) and Altan Gürman (2019) published by Arter.

Demir has a combined BA degree in Visual Art and Art History from Columbia University in New York. She has recently joined the faculty of the Visual Art and Visual Communication Design department at Sabancı University in Istanbul.