Editorial Board

Massumeh Farhad joined the 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 the Freer and Sackler, 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).

Kit Brooks is the Curator of Asian Art at Princeton University Art Museum. 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.

Their recent projects include the exhibitions Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints (2024) and Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell (2023), the first US museum exhibition dedicated to the psychedelic Japanese Fluxus artist Ay-Ō (b. 1931). Previously, they have held positions at the British Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Boston Children’s Museum.

Kevin Carr is the associate professor of Japanese art at the University of Michigan. He teaches all aspects of the history of Japanese art and archaeology, but his research focuses on the visual cultural of popular religious cults of medieval Japan (especially thirteenth-fifteenth centuries). His work engages issues of visual narrative, hagiography, and the construction of history and national consciousness through art. He has also worked on cultural exchanges between Japan and Europe in the seventeenth century and the nineteenth century, the epistemological foundations of medieval art, and the interpretation of material culture in the absence of textual evidence. His current project focuses on communal identities as manifest in images of temple origin stories (engi-e) in fourteenth-century Japan.

Antonietta Catanzariti is Associate Curator for the Ancient Near East at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 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 the Freer and Sackler, 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).

Annapurna Garimella is an art historian and a designer. Her research focuses on late medieval Indic architecture and the history and practices of vernacular visual and built cultures in India after Independence (1947). Garimella is the managing trustee of Art, Resources and Teaching Trust, which has a research library and conducts independent research and teaching. She also heads Jackfruit Research & Design, an organization with a specialized portfolio of design, research, and curation. Jackfruit’s recent curatorial projects include Mutable: Ceramic and Clay Art in India Since 1947 (Piramal Museum of Art, 2017) and The Past Has a Home in the Future: Dhoomimal Gallery and Connaught Place (New Delhi, 2024). She is currently cocurating with Vidya Dehejia In the Realms of Friendship, a visual history of friendship in South Asia, for the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. Garimella has also designed and managed the construction of MV Ganga Vilas, inaugurated in 2022, which sails the world’s longest river cruise. Most recently, Garimella has developed and taught the online course “A History of Indian Craft: 1850s to the Present” for MAP Academy, which provided a world art history for Indian craft to more than 3,000 registered participants. Her newest books are a coedited volume, The Contemporary Hindu Temple: Fragments for a History (Marg, 2019), and The Long Arc of South Asian Art: Essays in Honour of Vidya Dehejia (Women Unlimited, 2022). Designing India: 1947 to the Present, an edited volume; A Face on a Face: South Asian Masks in the Vaidya Collection; Digesting the Past: The Discourse of Sacralized Architectural Renovation in Southern India (14th–17th Centuries); and Propositions for Art Worlds (Women Unlimited, 2025) are book manuscripts under preparation.

Lihong Liu is Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures and assistant professor of the history of art  at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Liu studies extensively on arts of China during the second millennium with a focus on the Ming and Qing dynasties. A specialist of Chinese painting and calligraphy, she has written on a wide range of topics to expand the understanding of Chinese art history through eco-critical and post-humanist approaches. She is currently finishing her book project on the ecology and politics of riverine spaces in Chinese paintings of the early and mid-Ming periods. Another ongoing project deals with transparent glass as a transcultural medium in the early modern world. She has also developed a project exploring the modalities of atmospherics in Chinese paintings.

Pavel B. Lurje studied the history of Iran and Afghanistan in the Oriental Department at the Saint Petersburg State University. He obtained his PhD at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences, in 2004, writing on the toponymy of medieval Central Asia. From 2004–2009, he acted as a postdoc at the Institute of Iranian Studies, publishing a dictionary of Sogdian anthroponyms in the series Iranisches Personennamenbuch.

Since 2009, he has worked in the Oriental Department of the State Hermitage Museum and curates parts of the Central Asian and Iranian collections. He has been a member of the Panjakent archaeological expedition since 1994 and codirector since 2010, working on the famous early medieval site in Tajikistan. He is also codirector of the Central Iranian archaeological expedition of the State Hermitage. Pavel Lurje writes extensively on East Iranian philology, archaeology, and the arts of Central Asia. He cocurated the exhibition Expedition Silk Road: Treasures from the Hermitage at the Hermitage Amsterdam (now the H’ART Museum) in 2014.

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.

Jin Xu is the Jane and Leopold Swergold Associate Professor of Chinese Art History at Columbia University. He specializes in premodern Chinese art, with a focus on the imperial period (221 BCE–1911 CE). His research explores how migrant communities—both non-Chinese immigrants in China and Chinese emigrants in border regions—expressed their identities through art and architecture. His first book project examines the art of the Sogdians, an Iranian-speaking immigrant community in early medieval China. It highlights how Sogdian leaders and their families used materials, images, and architecture to represent their diverse life experiences. He is currently working on a book about figural representations during the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534), the first major dynasty in Chinese history founded by nomadic immigrants.

Sana Mirza was part of the Scholarly Programs and Publications division of the National Museum of Asian Art from 2014 – 2024. She has contributed to various research projects related to Islamic Art and managed digital initiatives, including the online exhibition The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads. In addition to her work managing Ars Orientalis and other research publications, Sana coordinated the museum’s fellowship programs and scholarly events.

Sana received her PhD in Islamic Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2021. Her dissertation explores a corpus of Qur’an manuscripts from eastern Ethiopia produced between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and their Red Sea and Indian Ocean milieus. She co-edited with Simon Rettig The Word Illuminated: Qur’an Manuscripts from the 7th–17th Centuries (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press) and contributed to the exhibition catalogue The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts as well as several edited volumes and journals. Sana earned her BA in History and Art History with a minor in Islamic Studies from George Mason University and an MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She is currently a program specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress.

Judy Lee joined the National Museum of Asian Art’s Scholarly Programs and Publications Department in 2022. As the scholarly programs and publications specialist, she coordinates the museum’s fellowship programs, serves as the publication coordinator for Ars Orientalis, and manages other research publications.

Judy received her MEd in curriculum and instruction with a focus in instructional technology from the University of Virginia in 2019, where she also earned her BA in art history and cognitive science. She has held positions at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Monticello, and Dumbarton Oaks.