Janice Li

Janice is a curator at Wellcome Collection (London, UK) where she endeavours to transcend boundaries in identities, cultures and disciplines through an interdisciplinary lens. She has curated exhibitions such as Thirst: In Search of Freshwater (forthcoming 2025), The Cult of Beauty (2023-2024) and The Healing Pavilion (2022-2023).

She is an advocate for transdisciplinary practices across the arts, humanities and STEM as agents of change, particularly in relation to ecology and intersectionality. By connecting fields of study such as visual and material cultures, environmental archaeology, anthropology, to include research into health, data science and philosophical ethics, they nurture more comprehensive ways of understanding environmental and social justice. Many of her projects look into interactions and movements between people and the ‘things’ they sense, make, use and wear across time and space in a crossmodal and transcultural context. 

Until 2021, Janice was an assistant curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum for the V&A East project, a new museum set to open in East London in 2025, and had worked on the exhibition Fashioned from Nature (2018-2019) and the Royal Photographic Society collection.

In her independent practice, she has curated exhibitions and commissioned cultural projects internationally, for instance, at Venice Design (2019), Salone del Mobile, Milan (2019), Vienna Design Week (2017), Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2018), Werkraum Bregenzerwald (2018), Gwangju Design Biennale (2019). As founding member of the Hong Kong Design History Network, she co-curated the Hong Kong Pavilion, Sandtable, at London Design Biennale 2021.

Janice speaks regularly on curatorial and research methodologies and sustainable practices at universities and arts institutions. She is also an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communications’ MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures. Before venturing into the museum sector and completing an MA in History of Design at the Royal College of Art, she had a brief stint in Life Sciences.