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 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). At the National Museum of Asian Art, Brooks has curated several exhibitions, most recently Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell (2023).

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).

Dipti Khera is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. As a scholar of early modern South Asia, with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology, and architecture, her research and teaching integrate longue durée perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies. Along with specializing in paintings, books, scrolls, and maps, radiating out of northern and western India, she has published on the crafting of colonial taste and global design by nineteenth-century silversmiths in Madras and foregrounded vernacular travel artifacts that reveal global art history’s conceptual blind spots and archival borders in narrating stories of mobility and migration. Khera’s The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020) was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in Indian Humanities by the American Institute of Indian Studies and shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies by Indiana University. A co-edited volume for Journal18 (December 2021), “The ‘Long’ Eighteenth-Century?” considers from which vantage points, whether local, regional, or transregional, is the eighteenth century long, and to what ends we deploy such visual and material microhistories. Her collaborative work with Rajasthan’s museums and libraries has led to conservation, exhibition, and digital projects, including co-curating with Debra Diamond, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (opening at the National Museum of Asian Art in November 2022).

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.

Sana Mirza joined the Scholarly Programs and Publications division of the National Museum of Asian Art in 2014. 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 coordinates 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 is coediting with Simon Rettig The Word Illuminated: Qur’an Manuscripts from the 7th–17th Centuries (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press) and has contributed to the exhibition catalogue The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. 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.

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.