Christine Y. Kim is a Korean American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles.

From 2021 to 2026, Kim served as Britton Family Curator-at-Large, North American Art, at Tate Modern, London, where she vastly expanded the permanent collection with acquisitions of work by artists of color, focusing on divergent forms of storytelling, multiple diasporas, and transhistorical narratives. She developed displays Barbara Chase-Riboud and Robert Motherwell (2024–25), Poetics of Blackness: Dawoud Bey and Roy DeCarava (2025–26), and Sovereignty of Quiet: Elizabeth Catlett, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Barkley Hendricks, Rashid Johnson, Tau Lewis, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Charles White (2026–27).

Prior to Tate, Kim was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for twelve years. She organized major monographic exhibitions including Julie Mehretu (2019–22), Isaac Julien: Playtime (2019), Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination (2015–16), and James Turrell: A Retrospective (2013–14). Her most recent exhibition was the highly acclaimed Black American Portraits (2021-22).

Earlier in her career, Kim was a curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She co-curated the influential Freestyle (2001) exhibition with Thelma Golden, launching the museum’s acclaimed “F” series, followed by Frequency (2005) and Flow (2008). She also organized Black Belt (2003), which included works of art by Asian American artists such as Patty Chang and David Diao alongside works by African American artists such as David Hammons, Ellen Gallagher, and Arthur Jafa in the context of 1970s and 1980s popular culture and martial arts. Kim is responsible for including artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in their first US museum exhibitions.

Holding an MA from New York University, Gallatin School of Individualized Study in American Studies and Critical Theory, and a BA in Art History and French with a minor in Asian American studies from Connecticut College, New London, Kim has contributed to multiple publications and guest-curated major projects and exhibitions including sister dreamer, lauren’s halsey’s ode to tha surge n splurge of southcentral los angeles (2026-27), and The Ends: The Politics of Participation in the Post-Internet Age at the 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018) in South Korea.

Kim co-founded non-profit art organizations Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) (2009), GYOPO (2017), and Museums Moving Forward (MMF) (2020), and currently serves on boards of GYOPO, MMF and Denniston Hill. She also serves as advisor for LAND, A&L Berg Foundation, and Critical Productive.

Upcoming major projects include Minor Feelings, a touring exhibition which reexamines dominant narratives of “Korean art” by complicating its definition and presenting nuanced examinations of work by over twenty 21st century Korean and diasporic Korean artists, opening at LACMA in 2027.