Yao Wu, Huang Family Curator of Chinese Art and Culture

Yao Wu brings nearly two decades of museum experience and an extensive academic background to PEM. As the museum’s inaugural Huang Family Curator of Chinese Art and Culture, she is creating new interpretive galleries for Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old Chinese home, as well as the museum’s renowned collections of Chinese art and culture.

Previously the inaugural Jane Chace Carroll Curator of Asian Art at the Smith College Museum of Art from 2015 to 2024, Wu is known for engaging diverse audiences, catalyzing cross-campus initiatives and developing strategic partnerships with a range of institutions and organizations among the Five Colleges and Museums10 (a consortium of art, history and science museums in western Massachusetts) and beyond. During her tenure at the Smith College Museum of Art, she significantly expanded the museum’s Asian art collection through hundreds of new acquisitions. She curated and co-curated more than 20 exhibitions and projects that explored a diverse range of historical and contemporary themes, including 体 Modern Images of the Body from East Asia (2018), Yu-Wen Wu—Voice, Visibility and Versatile Artistic Praxis: Asian/Asian Americans at Smith College (2021–2022) and Painting the Persianate World: Portable Images on Paper, Cloth and Clay (2024).

Fluent in English and Chinese, Wu is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Stanford University and she holds a master’s in art history from Williams College and a bachelor of arts in English Language and Literature from Fudan University, Shanghai. She was previously the inaugural Asian Art Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum and the Mellon Fellow for Curatorial Research in Asian Art at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center.