Cristian Nae earned a PhD in Philosophy at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi. Currently, he is a professor dr. habil. within the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design from UNAGE in Iasi, and the director of the Multidisciplinary Research Institute in Art (ICMA). His research focuses on critical art, exhibition studies and contemporary art theory and history.
He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2023). He received research grants from the Erste Foundation (2010-2011), the Getty Foundation and the “New Europe College” Institute of Advanced Studies in Bucharest (2010; 2011-2012) and the CAA-Getty international program (2012; 2017; 2021). Nae coordinated two research projects dedicated to art exhibitions in Romania and Eastern Europe during the socialist period, funded by CNCS-UEFISCDI (2015-2016 and 2018-2020). He was a senior consultant in the project “Periodisation in the History of Art and its Conundrums. How to tackle them in East-Central Europe” funded by the Getty Foundation within the Connecting Art Histories initiative (2019-2021).
He served in the International Committee of the College Arts Association, USA (CAA), and is a member of the European Network for Modernism and Avant-Garde Studies (EAM) and the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Currently, he is the President of AICA Romania.
He participated in conferences organized by prestigious institutions such as College Arts Association (CAA), USA (2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022), Association for Art History (AAH), UK (2019), ASEEES (San Francisco 2019, Washington D.C. 2025), the European Network for Modernism and Avant-Garde Studies (EAM) (University of Munster 2016, Lisbon 2022, Krakow 2024, Stockholm 2026), The Clark Art Institute, USA and Masaryk University, Brno (2010), University Paris 1 – Sorbonne and Columbia University (2017), University of Helsinki (2023), KEMKI Budapest (2023), Prague University of the Arts (2024), University of California, Santa Barbara (2023), Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich (2017), The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (2025), or as guest lecturer at the University of Saint Andrews (2023) and University Paris 1- Panthéon Sorbonne (2019).
His studies have been included in collective volumes such as Curating Socialism: A Handbook of International Art Exhibitions 1947-1989 (University of Toronto Press, 2026), Globalizing the Avant-Garde (de Gruyter/Brill, 2025), Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe (Routledge, 2024), State Construction and Art in East Central Europe 1918-2018 (Routledge, 2022), Art History in a Global Context (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), Realisms of the Avant-Garde (de Gruyter, 2020), Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere (Routledge, 2018) or Curating Eastern Europe and Beyond: Art Histories through the Exhibition (Peter Lang, 2013).
His articles were published in major peer-reviewed, WoS and SCOPUS indexed journals such as Third Text, ARTmargins (Print), Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe or Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
He edited the publications (In)visible frames (Idea, 2019) and Romanian Contemporary Art 2010-2020 (Hatje Cantz, 2020).