NEW YORK, NY.- The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College announces Gridthiya Gaweewong, Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, as the 2025 recipient of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. The award, which first launched in 1998, honors outstanding curatorial achievements that have brought innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to advancing the field of exhibition-making today. In addition, CCS Bard will be celebrating Amber Esseiva (CCS ‘15), Acting Senior Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) with the CCS Bard Alumni Award, which recognizes an outstanding graduate for sustained innovation and engagement in exhibition making, public education, research, and a commitment to the field. Both awards will be presented at a gala celebration and dinner on Monday, April 7, 2025, at The Lighthouse at Pier 61, Chelsea Piers, in New York City.

Gridthiya Gaweewong is an independent curator and the Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok whose practice addresses issues of social change experienced by artists from Thailand and beyond since the Cold War. Gaweewong also serves as a Guest Curator of the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai. Previously, she co-founded the Thailand Biennale 2023 in Chiang Rai with Rirkrit Tiravanija, as well as the alternative art space, Project 304, with Montien Boonma, Kamol Phaosavasdi, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which operated from 1996 through 2003.

Her curatorial projects include Imagined Borders, the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018); Missing Links, Bangkok (2015); Between Utopia and Dystopia, Mexico City (2011); Unreal Asia, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Oberhausen (2009); Politics of Fun, Berlin (2005); and Under Construction, Tokyo (2000–2002). Gaweewong also organized the Independent Curators International (ICI) exhibition, Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity in Madness in Chiang Mai, which traveled to Manila, Hong Kong, Chicago, Oklahoma, and Taipei (2016–2020). Gaweewong is a 2018 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, MoMA, New York. Since 2020, she has been a member of the acquisition committee for the Singapore Art Museum. She was awarded the French Ministry of Culture’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2023, and currently serves as a member of the Finding Committee for Artistic Direction of Documenta 16.

Gaweewong received a Master of Arts in Administrations and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in1996 after working as an English teacher and librarian in a refugee camp in Phanat Nikhom.

Amber Esseiva is a curator and educator specializing in producing contemporary art exhibitions and programs by national and international mid-career and emerging artists. Esseiva is currently Acting Senior Curator at the ICA at VCU and was formerly the Curator-at-Large for The Studio Museum Harlem. Previously, Esseiva organized Surface has Space at The Judd Foundation and a solo exhibition by artist Alina Tenser at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, served as Guest Curator at the 2016 Glasgow International, a biennial festival of contemporary art, and as Director at Retrospective Gallery and September Gallery in Hudson, NY.

Most recently, Esseiva curated the first contemporary art exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Amaza Lee Meredith titled Dear Mazie (September 2024–March 2025). The exhibition includes commissions by AD-WO (Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood), The Black School (Shani Peters and Joseph Cuillier), Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Kapwani Kiwanga, Abigail Lucien, Practise (James Goggin and Shan James), Tschabalala Self, and Cauleen Smith. Esseiva has also curated solo exhibitions by Kandis Williams, Naima Green, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Martine Syms, among others. Other group exhibitions include Great Force (October 5, 2019–January 5, 2020) at the ICA at VCU, which featured new commissions and recent work by an intergenerational group of 24 artists, exploring how art can be used to envision new forms of race and representation freed from the bounds of historic racial constructs.

Esseiva received her M.A. in 2015 from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). She also co-founded the interdisciplinary curatorial journal aCCeSsions and was appointed the curator of the 2014 MFA graduate thesis exhibition at Bard MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She earned a B.A. in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Launched at CCS Bard in 1998 to recognize groundbreaking visionaries in the curatorial field, the Award for Curatorial Excellence is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. The award is named in recognition of patron Audrey Irmas, who bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award itself is designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.