Mai Yamaguchi is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator of Japanese and Korean Art. Prior to joining Mia, she was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she studied the Vershbow collection of Japanese illustrated books. In 2019, she curated the exhibition
“Animals and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Japan” at the Princeton University Art Museum.
Mai received her MA and PhD in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University. Her dissertation examined how readers engaged with and developed visual literacy through printed books of pictures in 19th-century Japan, and how they were later adapted abroad. Her research has been supported by Fulbright Japan, the Harvard- Yenching Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.