Sjoukje van der Meulen is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at Utrecht University. She obtained her master’s degree from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she studied with Professor Rosalind Krauss. She earned her doctoral degree in architectural history and theory at the same Ivy League university under the guidance of Professors Kenneth Frampton (sponsor) and Andreas Huyssen. During her academic career, van der Meulen has taught at several academic institutions, including, in the United States, Columbia University (Core Curriculum), the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Oregon and, in the Netherlands, the University of Amsterdam (Department of Media Studies: New Media and Digital Culture) and Utrecht University. She was also selected as Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professor 2020-2021 at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she gave lectures and courses on her research focus Art in the European Union. Other long-term research areas include Chinese contemporary art in a global context and art and digital culture, including the new challenges of AI for art and society. Van der Meulen identifies as an interdisciplinary art historian, intersecting art history with postcolonial and globalization studies, European studies and media studies.

In addition to her academic positions, van der Meulen was editor and art critic for Metropolis M and co-editor-in-chief of Stedelijk Studies, the scholarly online journal of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. After returning from the U.S. (where she lived from 1997 through 2012), she also worked for many years as a museum educator, lecturer, guide and "intermediary" for the Stedelijk Museum and the Van Gogh Museum - in four languages: Dutch, English, German and French. In these museum contexts, she has always enjoyed sharing her art historical knowledge with a wide national and international audience.