The Brown Institute for Media Innovation is thrilled to announce Eunbyeol Lee as the second Marco Castro Cosio Media Art and Technology Fellow. This year’s application cycle was incredibly competitive, and we were impressed and excited by all of the terrific candidates and ideas we received. Eunbyeol’s proposal stood out for its ambitious interdisciplinary vision and its deep alignment with Marco’s legacy of fostering meaningful connections across communities, cultures, and complex global challenges.
Flow and Remains
For her fellowship, Eunbyeol will develop Flow and Remains: An Oceanic Media Atlas of Climate Memory, a project that reads the ocean as an active archive of memory in the age of climate crisis. Focusing on three coastal constellations: Gorée Island in Senegal, Havana Bay in Cuba, and the archipelagos of Jeju and Okinawa in Korea and Japan, the project traces how artists and coastal communities translate the sea’s forces of movement and residue into visual, sonic, and data-driven language.
The project will culminate in an interactive Tidal Atlas, a web-based platform that layers archival material, environmental data, and artistic practice to show where climate change and inequality converge at the water’s edge. Developed in collaboration with technologists and journalists at the Brown Institute, this platform will serve as both a research tool and a public prototype adaptable to other shorelines and communities.
This fellowship exists to honor Marco’s legacy of purpose-driven collaboration and fresh perspective. One of the very first collaborations we did with Marco was a dinner created with the Media Lab at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Maia Nuku, Curator of Oceania at the Met. The conversation was positioned around the Rebbelib navigational chart in the Met’s collection — an object that holds knowledge through material, form, and relationship. A gridlike structure of lashed sticks, with curved strips suggesting ocean swells and intersections that can mark islands. It’s the kind of artifact that reminds you how information, story, and even wayfinding can be embedded in objects. And how interdisciplinary exchange can surface entirely new ways of seeing. In many ways, Lee’s proposal brought us back to that same feeling of possibility.
About Eunbyeol Lee
Eunbyeol Lee is a curator and researcher working across global contemporary art, with a focus on Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. With over five years of experience in the United States, South Korea, and South Africa, her work examines how visual and material practices engage displacement, ecological change, and the afterlives of empire.
Eunbyeol holds an MA in Global Arts and Cultures from the Rhode Island School of Design, where her master’s thesis, The Transformation of “Locality” in Contemporary Art: Senegal, Brazil, and Korea since 1960, received the RISD Research Center’s SPUR Fund in recognition of its scholarly excellence. As a Global Art Professional Fellow supported by the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange, she worked at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, providing curatorial research support on exhibitions engaging ecological questions. She is currently based in New York City, where she works at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), contributing to research and programs that advance global discourse on modern and contemporary Korean art.
We look forward to supporting Eunbyeol’s work over the coming year and sharing her progress with our community. Welcome, Eunbyeol!