About

Jordan Karney Chaim is a curator and contemporary art historian based in San Diego. From 2022 to 2026 she was Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego where she organized highly collaborative, artist-centric exhibitions. Recent projects include the first U.S. exhibitions by Dutch artist afra eisma (2025) and Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez Delgado (2024). She has also produced exhibitions with Las Hermanas Iglesias (2025), SUPERFLEX (2024), and Edra Soto (2023). In addition to the exhibition program, Jordan oversaw the museum’s collection of outdoor sculpture and created a celebrated Residency Program for San Diego and Northern Baja-based artists. Her research and writing has centered on the intersections of art and community, focusing on emerging artists and institutional histories in the United States. Her most recent writing can be found in East of Borneo,Hyperallergicand HereIn Journal.

Jordan holds a doctorate in the History of Art & Architecture from Boston University where she was a Raymond and Margaret Horowitz Foundation Fellow in American Art. Her dissertation, Do It Yourselves: Alternative Spaces and the Rise of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, 1970-1990, examines the origins of three exhibition spaces (The Woman’s Building, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in order to illustrate how a flourishing network of alternative spaces became one of Los Angeles’s most significant art-historical developments in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Jordan serves as Board Chair of the May Stevens & Rudolph Baranik Foundation (New York), and as a Board Member of The Hill Street Country Club (Oceanside, CA).