Cristian Nae earned a PhD in Philosophy at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi. At the moment, 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.
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). He 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 is a member of the International Committee of the College Arts Association in the US, the European Association for Modernism and Avant-Garde Studies and the International Association of Art Critics. He participated in conferences organized by CAA, AAH, ASEEES, The Clark Art Institute, INHA Paris or ZIKG Munich. His studies have been included in collective volumes such as 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). Recently, he edited the publications (In)visible frames (Idea, 2019) and Romanian Contemporary Art 2010-2020 (Hatje Cantz, 2020). He curated Romania’s participation in the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale (2019).