Melissa Chiu

August 19, 2024

Melissa Chiu is a museum director, curator and author. She is an authority on museum leadership and international contemporary art. She is currently the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the national museum of modern art and a part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Melissa Chiu is an Australian museum director, curator and author, and the director of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC.

Chiu worked as an independent curator for several years at the beginning of her career. In 1996, Chiu collaborated with a group of Asian Australian artists, performers, filmmakers and writers to establish Gallery 4A, a nonprofit contemporary art center devoted to promoting dialogue in the Asia-Pacific region.

In 2001, Chiu moved to New York to begin her role at the Asia Society Museum as curator of contemporary Asian and Asian-American art. This was the first curatorial post of its kind in an American museum. Her curatorial credits include exhibitions of Chinese-Australian artist Ah Xian, Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from the Pacific (2004), the first major museum exhibition on the subject, accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. Three years later, Chiu was appointed Director of the Asia Society Museum and took on responsibility for the traditional art holdings of the museum including the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of traditional Asian art.

In 2014, Chiu was appointed director of the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Under her leadership, the Hirshhorn Museum has focused on its mission to serve as the United States’ national museum of modern and contemporary art along with building its international standing through exhibitions, collection initiatives, scholarship, and technology.

Chiu earned her bachelor’s degree in 1992 at the University of Western Sydney in art history and criticism and her master’s in arts administration in 1994 from the College of Fine Arts at University of New South Wales. She completed her doctorate with a dissertation on experimental Chinese art at the University of Western Sydney in 2005. Chiu has authored and edited several books and catalogs on contemporary art, including Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader (MIT Press, 2010), and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Museum of Modern Art and other universities and museums.

In this episode of the Pearl Lam Podcast, Pearl Lam sits down with Melissa Chiu in her New York studio for an in-depth conversation about the differences between contemporary art and conceptual art, bridging the gap between East and West and much more.

Visit Melissa Chiu’s website here.

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