Melissa Chiu is a museum director, curator and author, and the Director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. She is a board member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Alliance of Museums, and the Museum Association of New York. A native of Australia, Chiu earned her bachelor’s degree in art history and criticism from the University of Western Sydney in 1992 and her master’s degree in arts administration in 1994 from the University of New South Wales. She completed her Ph.D., with a dissertation on contemporary Chinese art, at the University of Western Sydney in 2005. Chiu has authored and edited several books and catalogues on contemporary art, including Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader (MIT Press, 2010), and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Museum of Modern Art, and other universities and museums.