Iles has been the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art since 1997.
At the Museum, Iles has organized retrospectives of Dan Graham,[5] Claes Oldenburg,[6] Paul McCarthy,[7] Alan Michelson, Sharon Hayes, Jack Goldstein, and thematic group exhibitions Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964 – 1977, Riverrun, Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, as well as co-curating both the 2004[8] and 2006[9] Whitney Biennial exhibitions.
In 2001, Iles curated Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964 – 1977, the first survey exhibition of historical film and video installation in America.
The exhibition was met with broad critical acclaim; frieze's Michael Wilson called it a "triumph", lauding the "gutsy attempt by the museum's curator of film and video, Chrissie Iles, to make newly visible a critical period in the development of a now commonplace form" and pulling "off the seemingly impossible by allowing illusion to retain its power while simultaneously revealing its source.
[13] Iles has published and lectured at academic and arts institutions, including the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Whitney Independent Study Program, NYU, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts—where she is on the Faculty of the Curatorial Practice Masters program[14]—and Columbia University, where she is also a visiting professor.