Jenny Lin received her MA and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and BA in Architectural Studies and Italian Studies from Brown University. Her research explores relations between twentieth and twenty-first-century art and design praxes and social phenomena such as urbanization, globalization, and decolonization. Her first book Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture and the fashioning of global Shanghai (Manchester University Press, 2019) intervenes into global contemporary art discourse through a cross-cultural study of art, architecture, fashion, and film created in and about cosmopolitan Shanghai. Other writings have appeared in Art Margins, Shanghai Culture, Frieze, Flash Art, X-TRA, and the anthologies Fandom as Methodology, Participatory Urbanisms, Companion to Urban Imaginaries, and Cities of Light.

Professor Lin's research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including from the UC Pacific Rim Research Program, Confucius Institute, US Department of Education, and Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. 

Professor Lin has extensive curatorial and studio experience, having worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and with artists and galleries in Shanghai since the early 2000s. She recently published a catalog for her exhibition Picturing Global China, which received a Typography Award from Communication Arts Journal.