Associate and Assistant Curators

Rachel Allen (Nez Perce), Assistant Curator for Exhibitions and Research

Rachel Allen started at PEM as a summer fellow in the Mellon Native American Fellowship Program in 2017. She then moved to the position of the Mellon Curatorial Fellow and started her current position in 2019. Allen has assisted several exhibitions at PEM, including T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America and Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment. She previously supported Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker and Where the Questions Live, and is working on the new installation of the Native American collection.

Prior to joining PEM, she served as Assistant Professor at Michigan State University teaching arts management, and as Assistant Preparator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum working with international contemporary artists. While in Michigan, she co-founded the Emerging Museum Professionals Chapter of Michigan and received a certificate in Collections Care at the International Preservation Studies Center in Freeport, IL. Allen also maintains an art practice, exhibiting her work nationally.

Allen’s interests are in American, Native American, and contemporary art, as well as works on paper. Allen holds an MFA in Printmaking and an MA in Arts & Cultural Management and Museum Studies from Michigan State University. She received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Follow @rachel_c_allen on Instagram.

Sarah Chasse, Associate Curator for Exhibitions and Research

Chasse has over 10 years of curatorial experience at the Peabody Essex Museum contributing to many projects including Samuel McIntire, Carving an American Style; Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection; Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India After Independence and American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood.

Chasse's interests are in American and European decorative arts and design, early 20th century American art, and the history of interiors, collecting and museums. She earned her BA in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College and an MA in American Studies from the College of William and Mary, with a focus on art history and material culture. Before coming to PEM she worked at the Shelburne Museum and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. Follow @sass1837 on Instagram.

Lydia Gordon, Associate Curator for Exhibition Research and Publishing

Lydia Gordon is a specialist in modern and contemporary art. At PEM, she served as the coordinating curator for Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction and Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle. She also curated Vanessa Platacis: Taking Place. Her publication projects include contributing essays in Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle (Peabody Essex Museum / University of Washington Press, 2019), which received the 2020 Catalogue Award from the Association of American Art Curators and Inappropriate Bodies: Art Design, and Maternity (Demeter Press, 2019). Gordon is also associate professor of Modern Art History at Montserrat College of Art.

Prior to joining PEM, Gordon worked for the Society of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and as the Art Loan Manager at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. She earned her BA in Art Administration from Simmons College and her Dual MA in Art History, Theory and Criticism, Art Administration & Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research interests include the histories of modernisms, post-structuralist theory, and contemporary art.

Lan Morgan, Assistant Curator for Exhibitions and Research

Lan Morgan joined PEM in 2018. Her work on PEM’s Asian Export Art gallery received the 2020 Exhibition Award from the Association of American Art Curators. She formerly served as a Curatorial Fellow for American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, where she catalogued and prepared the collection during a $33 million renovation. She was also an Administrator for the European Decorative Arts department at Sotheby’s, New York, and has more recently contributed to curatorial projects at several Connecticut River Valley historical societies.

Morgan holds a BA in Communication and Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. As a Lois F. McNeil graduate fellow, her thesis examined the work of the American portraitist James Earl and his transatlantic networks of mercantile patronage. Morgan’s current research interests include cross-cultural exchange in the decorative arts, New England material culture, and early modern European and American portraiture traditions.

George Schwartz, Associate Curator for Exhibitions and Research

Schwartz has over 14 years of curatorial experience at PEM, contributing to many of the institution's most successful exhibitions including Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea and Ocean Liners: Glamour, Speed, and Style. He also co-curated The Yachting Photography of Willard B. Jackson.

Schwartz's interests are in maritime art, material culture, early collecting and museums. He earned his BA in Anthropology from Brown University, his MA in Historical Archaeology from UMASS Boston, and his PhD in American Studies from Boston University where he explored PEM’s origins and illustrated how global objects were used to shape an emerging national identity in the early United States. He has lectured internationally and has written articles and essays for museum catalogs, journals, and magazines. He recently published a new book, Collecting the Globe: The Salem East India Marine Society Museum. He teaches material culture at Tufts University in the Museum Studies program.

Stephanie H. Tung, Associate Curator for Exhibitions and Research

Stephanie Tung is a specialist in the history of photography of China. At PEM, she is co-curating China through the Lens, a major exhibition of 19th century photography of China, with Karina Corrigan, the H.A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art. She is also a PhD candidate at Princeton University, where she is completing a dissertation, “Pictorial China: Art Photography in Republican Era China, 1923 — 1929.” Her research interests include transnational art exchanges, global modernism, translation studies, and notions of artistic labor.

Prior to joining PEM in 2018, Tung worked at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, China as a curator and director of international affairs. Her exhibitions include Art Across Archives (Think!Chinatown Art Space, New York, 2018), Chinese Photography: Twentieth Century and Beyond (Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, 2015), and WATW: We are the World (Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, 2010). Tung has published widely on photography and contemporary art from China, as a contributor to Aperture and the Trans-Asia Photography Review and contributing author to The Chinese Photobook (Aperture, 2015) and Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World (Guggenheim, 2017). Her most recent book, Ai Weiwei: Beijing 1993-2003 (MIT Press, 2019), was co-authored with Ai Weiwei and John Tancock and serves as a continuation of Ai Weiwei: New York 1983-1993, for which she also served as lead researcher.

Tung earned her BA in Comparative Literature and History of Art at Harvard University, and an MA in Art & Archaeology from Princeton University.