Soyoung Lee Named Chief Curator of Harvard Art Museums

The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have appointed Soyoung Lee, who has held various curatorial positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 2003, as its new chief curator. She will begin at the museums on September 24.

As chief curator, Lee will oversee the Harvard Art Museums’ three curatorial divisions—Asian and Mediterranean art, European and American art, and modern and contemporary art—as well as the institutions’ exhibition programs and permanent collections. She will also promote partnerships between the museums and campus organizations, and further develop internship and postgraduate fellowship programs.

Lee began her career at the Met as its first curator of Korean art; she was also an associate and assistant curator in the museum’s department of Asian art. Some of her curatorial credits at the museum include “Poetry in Clay: Korean Buncheong Ceramics from the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art” (2011), “Silla: Korea’s Golden Kingdom” (2013–14), and “Diamond Mountains: Travel and Nostalgia in Korean Art” (2018). Additionally, Lee served as chair of the Met’s Forum of Curators, Conservators, and Scientists from 2016 to 2017, and was the Forum’s delegate to the board from 2017 to 2018.

“While at the Met, I was fortunate to have been nurtured by a wealth of talented and generous colleagues,” Lee said in a statement. “I look forward to bringing that experience to Harvard, to cultivate in the next generation the kind of passion for art and knowledge that can transform one’s life.”

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