Gabriella Daris

Gabriella Daris is completing a PhD in philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London. Her doctoral thesis problematizes the instruction/institution dialectic in a 1960s context and examines critically the ontological distinctiveness, metaphysical importance, and social significance of Yoko Ono’s conceptual art. She works within a critical theoretical tradition based on a transdisciplinary conception of philosophy used as an apparatus for a transformative dynamic of art criticism. Her interests include aesthetics and philosophy of art, art theory, continental philosophy, and Critical Theory, with an art-historical focus on late modern, avant-garde and contemporary art.

Formerly a critic at Blouin Artinfo and Modern Painters, she is the curator of Yoko Ono: Looking For… (2019) and the convenor of the first international symposium on Yoko Ono held jointly at the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University in 2019. In 2023, she designed an extracurricular philosophy of art course on the concepts of freedom and play in Friedrich Schiller and Yoko Ono and delivered it to state secondary schools across London. She has held Visiting lectureships at Yale University (2023), the University of Belgrade (2022), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and a Visiting Research Fellowship at Waseda University (2022).

Her academic research and curatorial projects have been supported by the Getty Foundation; the Henry Moore Foundation; the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation; the Japan Foundation; the Emily Harvey Foundation; the British Society of Aesthetics; the British Association for Japanese Studies; the Association for Art History; and the British Council.