Catharsis Conference, December 2025
Christine Kuan and Prune Nourry in conversation with Claude Grunitzky (Tuesday, December 16, 2025).
Celebrating one year of Catharsis Conferences with an intimate conversation between Christine Kuan, one of the most influential advocates for artists working today, and Prune Nourry, the founder of Catharsis Arts Foundation and artist in residence at Atelier Jolie. Together with moderator Claude Grunitzky, they reflected on the transformative power of art, the infrastructure that sustains creative life, and what it means to build institutions that place artists at their center.
Christine Kuan is the President and Executive Director of Creative Capital Foundation, the nonprofit organization that has awarded grants and services to over 900 artists across the United States since 1999, supporting the creation of new work, sustainable careers, and freedom of expression. She assumed the role in 2021, after five years as CEO and Director of Sotheby's Institute of Art–New York. With over two decades of experience spanning the nonprofit and commercial art worlds, she has served as Chief Curator and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Artsy, Chief Curatorial Officer and Vice President of External Affairs at Artstor, and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Art Online/Grove Art Online at Oxford University Press, where she significantly expanded scholarly access to the work of women artists and artists of color. She has also held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and taught at the University of Iowa, Peking University, and Rutgers University. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BA in art history and English from Rutgers University.
Prune Nourry is a French multidisciplinary artist born in Paris in 1985, living and working between New York and Paris. Trained as a wood sculptor at the École Boulle in Paris, where she graduated with honors in 2006, she works across sculpture, installation, performance, film, and photography to interrogate bioethics, gender, the body, and the politics of human selection. Her landmark project Terracotta Daughters (2013) — 108 terracotta schoolgirls commissioned from artisans in Xi'an as a counter-monument to the Emperor Qin Shi Huang's army — traveled the world before being buried in China, to be unearthed in 2030. Her documentary Serendipity (Berlinale 2019, Tribeca 2019), executive produced by Angelina Jolie, Darren Aronofsky, and Sol Guy, chronicled her breast cancer diagnosis and recovery. She is represented by Galerie Templon (Paris, Brussels) and Simon Studer Art. In February 2024, she co-founded the Catharsis Arts Foundation with Claude Grunitzky, and from December 2024, she has occupied the second floor of Atelier Jolie as artist in residence — returning the iconic space to a working artist's studio.