About Wan Ling
Wan Ling Fahrer
Founder & Director | Artist | Art Educator | Museum Educator | College Professor
Wan Ling Fahrer is an artist, art educator, museum educator, and college professor whose practice spans more than two decades across museums, K–12 schools, higher education, and community settings.
She currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Art Education at Adelphi University and teaches and supervises preservice educators at Hunter College and Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). Her higher-education work includes art education, curriculum and instruction, assessment, arts integration, expressive arts, museum education, and the preparation and mentorship of future educators.
Her museum education experience includes extensive work with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as well as teaching, educational programming, and collaborations with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Drawing Center, The New Museum, and Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.
Prior to moving more fully into higher education, Fahrer spent more than fifteen years as a New York City public-school art educator, including serving as a tenured visual arts teacher.
Her educational practice is grounded in inquiry-based and object-based learning, visual literacy, culturally responsive teaching, interdisciplinary curriculum, multimodal learning, and the belief that learners’ experiences and perspectives are essential to meaningful encounters with art.
Studio Practice
Wan Ling Fahrer as an Artist
Wan Ling Fahrer is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores identity, migration, memory, place, history, and belonging. Drawing from personal and family histories, her work considers how individual experiences intersect with larger cultural and historical narratives and how memory, place, and lived experience shape our understanding of home and identity.
Working across photography, digital media, drawing, mixed media, and installation, Fahrer often brings together personal imagery, archival references, familiar places, and cultural symbols to create layered visual narratives. Her practice is informed by her experience as an immigrant, educator, and museum practitioner and by a lifelong relationship with New York and Long Island.
Fahrer’s work New Beginnings, a digital composite photograph examining migration, memory, and belonging, was selected for Just Powers: Long Island Biennial 2026 at The Heckscher Museum of Art. Her work has also been exhibited in New York City and on Long Island.
For Fahrer, artistic practice and education are deeply interconnected. The same principles that guide her studio work—inquiry, experimentation, multiple perspectives, personal meaning, and reflection—inform her approach to teaching. Rather than viewing the artist and educator as separate roles, she sees each as an extension of the other: making art generates questions, and those questions create opportunities for dialogue, connection, and learning.
Museum & Community Engagement
Wan Ling Fahrer serves on the Education & Visitor Experience Committee at The Heckscher Museum of Art, contributing perspectives as an artist, museum educator, K–12 educator, and higher-education faculty member.
Education & Credentials
- MA, Art History — Hunter College
- BFA, Fine Art; Minor in Art Education — School of Visual Arts
- New York State Certification — Visual Arts Education, K–12
Selected Professional Experience & Collaborations
Museums & Cultural Institutions
- The Museum of Modern Art
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- The Drawing Center
- New Museum
- The Heckscher Museum of Art
- Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
- Keith Haring Foundation
- New-York Historical Society
- South Street Seaport Museum
- Asian American Arts Centre
- Sotheby’s
Higher Education
- Adelphi University
- Hunter College, CUNY
- Queens College, CUNY
- School of Visual Arts
- Bank Street College of Education
Schools & Educational Organizations
- NYC Department of Education
- P.S. 183 Robert Louis Stevenson School
- P.S. 9 The Renaissance School
- The Dalton School
- M.S. 54 Booker T. Washington
- P.S. 92Q
- University Council for Art Education
Libraries & Community Organizations
- Middle Country Public Library
- Bay Shore-Brightwaters Public Library
- Elwood Public Library
- Queens Public Library
- YMCA
- Sunshine Prevention Center
Roles and the nature of the work differ across these institutions. Listings reflect professional experience and collaboration and do not indicate institutional endorsement.
