Melissa ChiuHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

    Melissa Chiu is director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Previously she was director of Asia Society Museum in New York and senior vice president for global arts and cultural programs for the Society’s eleven centers and affiliates in the United States and Asia, including new cultural centers in Hong Kong and Houston. During her thirteen-year tenure at Asia Society, Chiu negotiated international first-time loan exhibitions with a number of foreign governments, including Vietnam, Pakistan, and Myanmar (Burma), in addition to establishing the U.S.-China Museum Leaders Forum with the aim to improve cultural relations through museum partnerships. In 2007 she launched a contemporary art collection with a focus on photography and video to complement the museum’s renowned collection of traditional Asian art, gifted to the Society in 1978 by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. As a leading authority on contemporary art, she has curated more than thirty exhibitions, including major monographic surveys of the works of Zhang Huan and Yoshitomo Nara, and a historical exhibition of art from China’s Cultural Revolution (“Art and China’s Revolution,” 2008), all accompanied by comprehensive books on the subject. She has written and edited scholarly publications such as Asian Contemporary Art (Thames and Hudson), and an anthology of collected writings titled Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader (MIT Press).