Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art
Chase F. Robinson is the Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art, which together constitute the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. He joined the museum in December 2018. As director, Robinson leads the museum in a five-year strategy that will expand its renowned collections of the arts of East Asia, South Asia, and the Islamic world, celebrate its century-long association with American art, introduce new audiences and technologies, and foster an understanding of the arts, cultures, and societies of Asia.
Robinson came to the Smithsonian from the Graduate Center, the research campus of the City University of New York, where he had served as President (2013–18), as Provost and Senior Vice President (2008–13), and as Distinguished Professor of History. From 1993 to 2008, Robinson was a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Wolfson College in England. As Professor of Islamic History, Robinson chaired the Faculty Board of the department, which offers degrees in the languages, histories, cultures, and arts of East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Robinson earned his BA degree at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his MA and PhD degrees in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His studies also took him to Jerusalem and Cairo.
A scholar of Islamic history and culture, Robinson has been awarded fellowships by the British Academy and Institute for Advanced Study, among others. He has authored or edited nine books and more than forty articles that span the geographical and chronological breadth of the pre- and early modern Middle East. His book Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives (2016) has been translated into several languages. The Works of al-Ya’qubi (2017) is a coedited, three-volume set of translations of some of the earliest surviving works of history and geography in Arabic. He has served on many boards and editorial committees and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
News and Remarks:
Statement from the Director (March 19, 2021)
A different Lunar New Year celebration in D.C. (February 10, 2021)
Director’s Introduction to the Museum for the Relay Project
(premiered September 2020)
This video presentation is part of the Treasure Hunt Relay: Global Museum Director’s Choice, a digital initiative of the National Museum of China dedicated to helping audiences learn remotely about the cultural treasures of national museums from around the world, in both Chinese and English. Within twenty-four hours of its launch, our program was enjoyed by over one million viewers.
After Pearl Harbor, our museum hid Asian art. In coronavirus crisis, we’re showing it off. (May 2, 2020)
Listen to Chase F. Robinson’s remarks at the “Age Old Cities” press preview
Listen to Chase F. Robinson’s remarks at the “Whistler in Watercolor” press preview
The Ebrahimi Family Curator of Persian, Arab, and Turkish Art, Senior Associate Director for Research
Massumeh Farhad joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in 1995 as associate curator of Islamic Art. In 2004, she was appointed chief curator and curator of Islamic art. She is a specialist in the arts of the book from sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Iran. Dr. Farhad has curated numerous exhibitions on the arts of the Islamic world at NMAA, including Art of the Persian Courts (1996), Fountains of Light: The Nuhad Es-Said Collection of Metalwork (2000), Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey (2005–6), The Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in the Moscow Kremlin (2009), Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009–10), Roads of Arabia: History and Archaeology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (2012), and The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (2016).
She received her PhD in Islamic Art History from Harvard University in 1987. Her publications include Slaves of the Shah: New Elites in Safavid Iran (2004), Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009), The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (2016), and A Collector’s Passion: Ezzat-Malek Soudavar and Persian Lacquer (2017).
The Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art
Kit Brooks holds a PhD in Japanese art history from Harvard University (2017), studying under professors Yukio Lippit and Melissa McCormick. Specializing in prints and paintings of the Edo and Meiji periods, their primary research interests revolve around the reevaluation of “eccentric” artists of the eighteenth century, as well as the relationship between illustrated books and paintings, and special prints that emulate the visual qualities of other media, such as surimono and takuhanga.
Brooks has held positions at the British Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Children’s Museum in Boston. They curated the exhibition Uncanny Japan: The Art of Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) at the Worcester Art Museum (2015) and cocurated Living Proof: Drawing in 19th-Century Japan at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2017–18). Brooks is also a graduate of the CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (2016).
Associate Curator for the Ancient Near East
Antonietta Catanzariti is Associate Curator for the Ancient Near East at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. She joined in 2016 as a fellow and served as the Robert and Arlene Kogod Secretarial Scholar from 2018 to 2022. Catanzariti received her BA and MA from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and a PhD in the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an active archaeologist and has excavated in Italy, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Since 2015, she has been the director of the Qara Dagh Regional Archaeological Project (QDRAP), which conducts surveys and excavations in the Qara Dagh Valley, Iraqi Kurdistan.
A specialist in the ceramic economy and art of the ancient Near East, Catanzariti is interested in the impact of landscape and trade routes on the formation and interactions of ancient communities. Catanzariti has lectured on topics related to the ancient Near East’s ceramic economy and her excavation projects. Since her arrival at NMAA, she has served as the in-house curator for Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt (2017) and curated Shaping Clay in Ancient Iran (2018), Ancient Yemen: Incense, Art, and Trade (2022), and A Collector’s Eye: Freer in Egypt (2023).
Elizabeth Moynihan Curator for South and Southeast Asian Art
Dr. Debra Diamond is Elizabeth Moynihan Curator for South and Southeast Asian Art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. She is currently re-cataloguing paintings in the collection, working on an international loan exhibition for 2022, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, and designing a digital component for an exhibition of Persian and Mughal painting, Writing My Truth: The Mughal Emperor Babur. Her most recent exhibition, Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia (2017), was accompanied by the publication of Paths to Perfection, the museums’ first handbook of its Buddhist collections, and an app exploring Tibetan sacred spaces. Her reinstallation of the permanent South Asian galleries in the Freer, Body Image: Arts from the Indian Subcontinent, also opened the same year.
A specialist in Indian court painting and the visual culture of yoga, Dr. Diamond received First Place Awards of Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators for her exhibition, Yoga: The Art of Transformation (2013) and for the associated catalogue. In 2008, she was the curator for the acclaimed international exhibition Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur; the exhibition catalog won the 2010 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. award for best museum scholarship and Smithsonian Secretary’s research prize. She also coordinated the yearlong Celebration of India at NMAA, which encompassed two exhibitions and a wide array of public programs devoted to making south Asian art and culture come alive for diverse audiences.
Dr. Diamond has curated numerous exhibitions at NMAA, including Worlds within Worlds: Imperial Paintings from India and Iran (2012); In the Realm of the Buddha (2010); Facing East: Portraits from Asia (2006); Perspectives: Simryn Gill (2006); Autofocus: Raghubir Singh’s Way into India (2003); and the re-installation of Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas at the Freer. She received her PhD in south Asian art history from Columbia University (2000).
The Ebrahimi Family Curator of Persian, Arab, and Turkish Art, Senior Associate Director for Research
Massumeh Farhad joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in 1995 as associate curator of Islamic Art. In 2004, she was appointed chief curator and curator of Islamic art. She is a specialist in the arts of the book from sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Iran. Dr. Farhad has curated numerous exhibitions on the arts of the Islamic world at NMAA, including Art of the Persian Courts (1996), Fountains of Light: The Nuhad Es-Said Collection of Metalwork (2000), Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey (2005–6), The Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in the Moscow Kremlin (2009), Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009–10), Roads of Arabia: History and Archaeology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (2012), and The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (2016).
She received her PhD in Islamic Art History from Harvard University in 1987. Her publications include Slaves of the Shah: New Elites in Safavid Iran (2004), Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009), The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (2016), and A Collector’s Passion: Ezzat-Malek Soudavar and Persian Lacquer (2017).
Curator of Japanese Art
Frank Feltens is Curator of Japanese Art at the National Museum of Asian Art. He holds a PhD in Japanese art history from Columbia University. Feltens is a specialist in Japanese art with a focus on the late medieval and early modern periods. Additional interests include Japanese photography and the intersections between painting and ceramics.
Feltens has published and lectured on a range of topics related to Japanese art. Recent articles examine the painters Ogata Kōrin and Sakai Hōitsu and the photographer Domon Ken. He has written and coauthored books about Katsushika Hokusai and the Zen monk-painter Sesson Shūkei. Prior to coming to the National Museum of Asian Art, he held research positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, and the Nezu Museum as well as at the temple Sensōji in Tokyo. At NMAA, Feltens has organized a number of exhibitions, including Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan (2022), Hokusai: Mad about Painting (2019–21), Japan Modern: Prints in the Age of Photography (2018–19), Painting the Classics (2019), and The Way of the Kami (2019). Feltens is a longtime practitioner of the Japanese tea ceremony in the Urasenke tradition and carries the honorary tea name Sōchoku. His book Ogata Kōrin: Art in Early Modern Japan (2021) was published with Yale University Press.
To contact Frank, please email Takako Sarai.
News and Remarks:
Listen to Frank Feltens’s remarks at the “Mad About Painting: Hokusai” press preview
The Lunder Curator of American Art
Diana Greenwold specializes in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American fine and decorative arts. She is particularly interested in stories of trans-national exchange and the ways objects carry and transform culture. From 2014 to 2021, Diana served in various curatorial positions, ultimately as Curator of American Art, at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. There, she oversaw the museum’s collection of over 11,000 American paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts. Her recent exhibitions include Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington (2020) and In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–69 (2018). At the PMA, Greenwold also spearheaded the multi-stage reinterpretation of the Winslow Homer Studio. Diana Greenwold received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation focused on immigrant craft workshops in New York and Boston settlement houses.
Associate Curator of Contemporary Asian Art
Carol Huh, the associate curator of contemporary Asian art, became the first curator of contemporary art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in 2007. Huh focuses on current artistic production related to Asia through exhibitions, acquisitions, and public programs.
Recent projects include the museum’s groundbreaking series of contemporary art installations in the Sackler pavilion, featuring works by Y.Z. Kami, Anish Kapoor, Hai Bo, Hale Tenger, Rina Bannerjee, Ai Weiwei, Chiharu Shiota, Michael Joo, and Subodh Gupta, among others. Huh organized Moving Perspectives, the Sackler’s first series of exhibitions focusing on video art from Asia. Special exhibitions include Japan Modern: Photographs from the Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck Collection (2018), Notes from the Desert: Photographs by Gauri Gill (2016), Symbolic Cities: The Work of Ahmed Mater (2016), Sense of Place: Landscape Photographs from Asia (2013), Nine Deaths, Two Births: Xu Bing’s Phoenix Project (2013), Shadow Sites: Recent Work by Jananne al-Ani (2012), and Fiona Tan: Rise and Fall (in-house curator, 2010).
Huh is a member of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Committee and the Smithsonian Networks Review Committee. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
The Shirley Z. Johnson Assistant Curator of Japanese Art
Sol Jung specializes in Japanese art history with a focus on how transnational maritime trade impacted Japan’s visual culture during the premodern period. Jung received her B.A. with distinction in History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and her M.A. in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University. Sol curated Princeton University Art Museum’s first thematic exhibition of Korean ceramics entitled Korean Ceramics: From Archaeology to Art History. She has examined the reception of Korean tea bowls, called kōrai jawan in Japan, during the sixteenth century. Fieldwork at several maritime settlement sites in Japan, and analysis of period tea documents, literary texts, and archaeological remains have informed her research, which has been supported by the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies and the Kyujanggak International Center for Korean Studies.
Associate Curator for the Arts of the Islamic World
Simon Rettig is the Associate Curator for the Arts of the Islamic World at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. He previously worked at the French Research Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul and the Freie Üniversität in Berlin. Rettig received a BA from the École du Louvre in Paris and his MA and Doctorate from the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I, France.
Between 2012 and 2016, he was the curatorial fellow for the arts of the Islamic World at NMAA. Rettig curated the exhibition Nasta‘liq: The Genius of Persian Calligraphy (2014), The Prince and the Shah: Royal Portraits from Qajar Iran (2018), and was the co-curator with Massumeh Farhad of The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (2016). In 2020, he served as the in-house curator in charge of the exhibition Age Old Cities: A Virtual Journey from Palmyra to Mosul. His current projects include the preparation of an exhibition on the Great Mongol Shahnama (scheduled for 2024) and a monograph on the Freer’s celebrated Khusraw u Shirin manuscript.
Curatorial Assistant to Kit Brooks and Frank Feltens
Takako Sarai was trained in Japan as a traditional calligrapher of Japanese script. She is a master of old Japanese writing systems and reads and writes old phonetic scripts (hentaigana). After spending several years at NMAA as a research assistant, Takako joined the museums’ curatorial staff in 2005. Since then, her translations from English to Japanese have been appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and scholarly publications, including “Charles Lang Freer and his Hokusai Painting Collection” (Hokusai, Nikkei, 2005), “Women in the Realms of Clay” (Soaring Voices, The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, 2007), Hokusai’s Brush (Seigensha, 2018), “Freer Gallery of Art” (Bessatsu Takyō no. 269, Heibonsha, 2019) and “A Forgotten Star: Tomioka Tessai from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection” (Shūbi vol. 35, Shūbisha 2020).”
Contact by email / (202) 633-0403
Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art
Emma Natalya Stein received her PhD in the history of art at Yale and joined the curatorial staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in 2019. She has curated the exhibitions Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain, Prehistoric Spirals: Earthenwares from Thailand, and Power in Southeast Asia, and she is the author of the monograph Constructing Kanchi: City of Infinite Temples (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). Dr. Stein has also created a robust online resource for the Southeast Asia collections area that includes an interactive map of sacred sites in diverse landscapes. She is currently codeveloping The Art of Knowing in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas, a new installation of the museum’s South and Southeast Asia collections.
Grounded in extensive fieldwork throughout India and Southeast Asia, Dr. Stein’s research has been sponsored by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre, Yale University, and the Smithsonian. In partnership with SOAS University in London, Dr. Stein runs an annual workshop in Southeast Asia, and she frequently lectures and teaches in Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Melvin R. Seiden Curator of Chinese Art
Jan Stuart became the first Melvin R. Seiden Curator of Chinese Art in 2014, after serving as Keeper of Asia (department head) at the British Museum from 2006 to 2014. There, in addition to senior management responsibilities and curatorial work, she led the project to create a new gallery for the Sir Percival David collection of Chinese ceramics. Prior to her position at the British Museum, Stuart began her career as a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art after holding a Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton and Yale Universities in Chinese art, language, and culture.
Her main curatorial focus is on arts from the tenth century forward, with emphasis on ceramics, decorative arts, textiles, and court arts, including paintings. Exhibitions with related publications at NMAA include Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912, with Daisy Yiyou Wang, co-organized with the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem) and the Palace Museum (Beijing) in 2018–19. Stuart was awarded the Secretary of the Smithsonian’s Research Prize in 2019 for the catalogue.
Other projects have included new displays of Chinese art for the 2017 renovation of the Freer Gallery, and exhibitions and publications Red: Ming Dynasty/Mark Rothko (2016); Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits, with Evelyn Rawski (2001); Return of the Buddha: Qingzhou Sculptures (2004); Joined Colors: Decoration and Meaning in Chinese Porcelain, with Louise Cort (1993); and Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang Dai-chien, with Fu Shen (1991). Stuart has been active in museum acquisitions and publishes and lectures regularly.
Contact by email
Curator of Ancient Chinese Art
A specialist in Chinese antiquities, J. Keith Wilson received his BA in Chinese Studies from Williams College (1978) and completed his PhD coursework at Princeton University (1988) after receiving MAs in Chinese art and archaeology from both the University of Michigan and Princeton. He was also a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo (1985–86). He was appointed curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1988–1996) and chief curator of Asian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1996–2006). Since joining the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, in 2006, he has reinstalled the ancient Chinese art galleries in the Freer Gallery and launched a comprehensive digital catalogue dedicated to the museum’s early jade collections.
Also interested in Chinese and Korean Buddhist art, Wilson co-organized Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan (2011) and initiated a digital imaging and research tool dedicated to the Freer Gallery’s renowned Cosmic Buddha, the subject of the monographic exhibition entitled Body of Devotion (2016–2017) and now an online feature.
In 2019, he organized Sacred Dedication: A Korean Buddhist Masterpiece and the digital catalogue Goryeo Buddhist Paintings: A Closer Look dedicated to the sixteen examples in US museum collections.
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Contact by email / 202.633.0317
Head of Public Programs
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Public Program Coordinator
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Public Program Coordinator
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Curator of Film
Tom Vick is the curator of film at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art. Formerly Vick was the coordinator of film programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has worked as a consultant for the International Film Festival Rotterdam and served on the juries of the Korean Film Festival in Los Angeles, the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, Filmfest DC, and the Smithsonian African-American Film Festival. He has contributed essays to Directory of World Cinema: Japan, Film Festival Yearbook, Asian Geographic, and other publications. He is the author of Asian Cinema: A Field Guide (2007) and Time and Place are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki (2015).
Contact by email / 202.633.0468
