Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Melanne Verveer, born on June 24, 1944, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, is the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security at Georgetown University. She also holds positions as a founding partner of Seneca Point Global, a women's strategy firm, and as a co-founder of Seneca Women. Verveer co-authored the book "Fast Forward: How Women Can Achieve Power and Purpose" with Kim Azzarelli.
Lowery Stokes Sims is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, Romare Bearden, Joyce J. Scott and others. She served on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has frequently served as a guest curator, lectured internationally and published extensively, and has received many public appointments. Sims was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
Kiran Desai is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.
Linda Nochlin was an American art historian, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and writer. As a prominent feminist art historian, she became well known for her pioneering 1971 article "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" published by ARTnews.
The Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts (N/BMFA) was an art museum in Nagoya, Japan, that operated from 1999 to 2018.
Grace Louise McCann Morley was a museologist of global influence. She was the first director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and held the position for 23 years starting in 1935. In an interview with Thomas Tibbs, she is credited with being a major force in encouraging young American artists. The government of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan, its third highest civilian award, in 1982.
Peggy Levitt is the Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology at Wellesley College and a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. Her latest book, Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Her current book project, Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre: Making the World’s Universities, Museums, and Libraries More Welcoming to Everyone will be published by Stanford University Press. Peggy writes regularly about globalization, arts and culture, immigration, and religion.
Robert Bromley Oxnam was an American China scholar who was President of the Asia Society New York. He ran the society for more than a decade, and led financial-cultural tours of China for Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and former U.S. President George H. W. Bush. He became well known in the public media after his 2005 autobiography, A Fractured Mind, in which he revealed that he had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
Wendy W. Luers is the founder and president of The Foundation for a Civil Society, a democratization and non-profit organization.
Louise Mirrer is an American historian who is president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. Under Mirrer’s direction, the New-York Historical Society has launched a series of exhibitions, including Slavery in New York; New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War; A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls; French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America; Grant and Lee in War and Peace; Lincoln and New York, Nueva York and a rich array of intellectually engaging lectures, debates and family programs. Mirrer inaugurated the Saturday Academy, an American history enhancement program for high-school students, and a new Graduate Institute on Constitutional History. Mirrer also led the Historical Society’s 100-million-dollar campaign for a major renovation of its landmark building on Central Park West, creating new permanent installation galleries and a children's history museum. Mirrer also oversaw efforts to create a Center for Women's History, which opened in the Fall of 2016.
Poulomi Desai is a British photographer, multi-media artist, curator and an activist community worker. A self-taught outsider artist originally inspired by a street theatre background, her works are performative, textual, image based, and acoustic - both digital and analog. She works with collaborative working processes which evolve through research, learning and action to examine the elusive, creating live and online large scale photographs, performances and outdoor sound installations.
Nisha Biswal née Desai is an American businesswoman and public official in the United States. Biswal is the Deputy CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. She previously served as Senior Vice President for international strategy and global initiatives and oversees South Asia programs at the United States Chamber of Commerce. Prior to this, she served as the President of the US-India Business Council at the US Chamber of Commerce. Previously, she has also served as Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in the United States Department of State under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017. Biswal was the first South-Asian American to hold this position. She oversaw the U.S.–India strategic partnership during a period of unprecedented cooperation, including the launch of an annual U.S.–India Strategic and Commercial Dialogue. Biswal was awarded the prestigious Samman Award by the President of India in January 2017. Biswal was also instrumental in launching the US-Bangladesh Partnership Dialogue, the C5+1 Dialogue between the United States and the Central Asian States of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Biswal also serves on the United States Institute of Peace International Advisory Council, on the Afghanistan Study Group and is on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Sustainable Communities, the Leadership Council for Women in National Security and is active in Democratic politics.
Vidya Dehejia is a retired academic and the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University. She has published 24 books and numerous academic papers on the art of South Asia, and has curated many exhibitions on the same theme.
Mahrukh Tarapor is an Indian museum professional and art consultant, known for her scholarship in museum art, especially Islamic art. She was honoured by the Government of India, in 2013, by bestowing on her the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award, for her contributions to the field of art.
Swati Khurana is a writer and contemporary artist of Indian-American origin. She was born in New Delhi, India in 1975. She emigrated to New York in 1977, where she lives and works. She graduated from Poughkeepsie Day School in 1993. She holds a B.A. in history from Columbia University, M.A. in Studio Art and Art Criticism from New York University, and an MFA in creative writing at Hunter College.
Alexandra Munroe is an American curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She has produced over 40 exhibitions and published pioneering scholarship on modern and contemporary Asian art. She organized the first major North American retrospectives of artists Yayoi Kusama (1989), Daido Moriyama (1999), Yoko Ono (2000), Mu Xin (2001), Cai Guo-Qiang (2008), and Lee Ufan (2011), among others, and has brought such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, and Chinese conceptual art, as well as Japanese otaku culture, to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which the New York Times named as one of 2017’s top ten exhibitions and ARTnews named as one of the decade’s top 25 most influential shows. Credited for the far-reaching impact of her exhibitions and scholarship bolstering knowledge of postwar Japanese art history in America and Japan, she received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.
Nalini Malani is an Indian artist, among the country's first generation of video artists.
Nilima Sheikh is a visual artist based in Baroda, India.
Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions was an exhibition held from 4 October 1996 to 5 January 1997, staged simultaneously in three locations in New York City: the Grey Art Gallery, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Asia Society Galleries. The exhibition was organized by Vishakha N. Desai, director of the Asia Society Galleries, and Thai guest curator Apinan Poshyananda.
