Associate and Assistant Curators

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, Assistant Curator for Exhibitions and Research

Prior to joining PEM, Gordon worked for the Society of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and as a Curatorial Fellow for the department of Exhibitions and Exhibitions Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has contributed to several Chicago-based exhibitions at SAIC's Sullivan Galleries, Hyde Park Art Center, and Comfort Station, Logan Square. Additionally, she has held the position of Art Loan Manager at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, where she organized the series New Media | Fresh Paint, showcasing contemporary artists living and working in New England.

Gordon earned her BA in Art Administration from Simmons College in 2010 and her Dual MA in Art History, Theory and Criticism, Art Administration & Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. A chapter of her MA thesis will appear in essay form in the upcoming publication Inappropriate Bodies, ed. Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve (Demeter Press, 2018). 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. 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.

Doris Sung, Assistant Curator for Exhibitions and Research

Prior to joining PEM in 2016, Sung was an adjunct professor of Chinese and East Asian art at York University, and the University of Toronto, Canada. She also held the position of Project Coordinator for the international research and digital humanities project A New Approach to the Popular Press in China: Gender and Cultural Production, 1904-1937.

Sung has also worked in a number of artist-run centers in Toronto, including A Space Gallery and Zen-Mix Pan-Asian Visual Arts Network as programming committee member and exhibition coordinator. During her tenure, Sung curated five exhibitions on works of Chinese-Canadian women artists, new art of the Asian diaspora in Canada and experimental calligraphy.

Sung earned her Ph.D. from the Graduate Program in Humanities at York University in 2016. Her dissertation focuses on Chinese women artists' contribution to the artistic and visual-cultural reforms in early 20th-century China. Sung is also a visual artist and holds an MFA in visual arts from York University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art of East Asia, cultural interactions between Asian and European artists, and feminism and visual culture.

George Schwartz, Curatorial Scholar

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 teaches material culture at Tufts University in the Museum Studies program.

Gordon Wilkins, Assistant Curator for Exhibitions and Research

Wilkins joined PEM in 2015. He worked as a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, as well as a Curatorial/Registration Department Intern at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art. He has also been a visiting student at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris as well as an intern at the Mona Bismarck American Center for Art and Culture in Paris, where he worked on a major Wyeth Family exhibition.

Wilkins received his BA in Art History summa cum laude from Hamilton College, writing his senior thesis on Marsden Hartley and the marketing of Maine. He earned his MA in Art History from the University of Chicago, where his thesis examined the construction of a Maine folk in fine and vernacular art during the 1930s. His current research interests include ethnographic photography, colonial exhibition practices and issues of race and identity in New England. Follow @gordonwilkins on Instagram.