Sophia Yadong Hao is a curator, writer and editor whose practice appropriates a rhizomatic approach to situate the curatorial as a mode of critical inquiry directly engaging with culture and the political as an open question. Hao leads the programme of Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, which is internationally recognised as a distinctive platform in Scotland for its radical curatorial research, international approach and focus on critical inquiries in contemporary art and culture.

In 2022, Hao was appointed a Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland.

Notable projects include NOTES on a return (2009), a re-contextualisation of performance art from 1980s Britain; Studio Jamming: Artists’ Collaborations in Scotland (2014); Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (2016–2017) that evokes the ethos of feminism for an alternative politics in culture and society; and CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland (2015–2021), an exhibition programme toured to five major art venues in China that interrogates contemporaneity in a global capitalist context. Since 2021, Hao has initiated and realised The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation, a five phase exhibition and event programme that examines the histories and future possibilities of creative pedagogy as a radical emancipatory praxis and emphasises knowledge as a collective experience rooted in social interaction.

Hao is also co-curator (with Edgar Schmitz) of the international touring forum Hubs and Fictions: on Current Art and Imported Remoteness.

As a writer, Hao has published books, articles, catalogue essays, novels and poetry internationally. Her publications include Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (Sternberg Press, 2019), Hubs and Fictions: On Current Art and Imported Remoteness (co-edited with Edgar Schmitz, Sternberg Press, 2016), A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (2015) and NOTES on a return (2010). Hao is the founder and Editor of the art journal &labels.

Hao currently serves as a committee member of British Art Network Steering Committee (Tate Britain and Paul Mellon Centre), and a member of Art 360 Advisory Group. She was a Board Member of Scottish Contemporary Art Network between 2012 – 2018 and a member of Live Art Sector Review Steering Group (Arts Council England, 2019–2021).

Hao was awarded the Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowship 2014/15.

Hao’s curatorial research is focused on:

- Rhizomatic curatorial methodology and its capacity to configure a ‘space of appearance’: the role of the curatorial in the production of the political.

- Art school gallery as a laboratory for radical pedagogies.

- The performativity of the gallery.

- Rethinking ‘contemporaneity’ of transnational contemporary art exhibitions in a global capitalist reality.

- Feminist ethos as a curatorial method.

- The role of fiction in the globally distributed art world ecology.

- The proposition of artists’ collaboration as a de-materialized studio and as an Event;

- The Para-curatorial as a mode of investigating and challenging ideas of public, context and critical discourse through discursive, participatory and process led strategies.