Michele Bambling (Director, Japan Society Gallery)

Raised in Tokyo and a fluent speaker of Japanese, Dr. Michele Bambling brings more than three decades of expertise with Japanese art as well as extensive international curatorial experience to her role as director of Japan Society Gallery. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi, with a research and teaching focus on Japanese art history and design.

Noboru Tsubaki（Director of ARTISTS' FAIR KYOTO, Aomori Triennale, and Setouchi Intl Art Festival | Contemporary Artist | Professor, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Graduate School, Kyoto University of the Arts)

Noboru Tsubaki is the director of ARTISTS' FAIR KYOTO, Aomori Triennale, and Setouchi Intl Art Festival. He is also a contemporary artist and professor in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Graduate School, at the Kyoto University of the Arts. Tsubaki has helped promote the Ronin Globus Onbeat AIR for several years as a program ambassador.

Katsura Yamaguchi
(Managing Director of Christie’s Japan and International Director of Christie’s Asian Art Departments)

As Managing Director of Christie’s Japan and International Director of Christie’s Asian Art departments, Katsura Yamaguchi has been a fundamental player in securing business deals and relationships in East Asia and New York. Yamaguchi has always had an important presence in Asia and was crucial to the growth of Christie’s offices in Tokyo, Japan. In addition to his business development role, as a former Senior Specialist of Japanese and Korean art he acts as a top-level client liaison worldwide. A native of Japan, Yamaguchi earned his B.A. at Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University in Tokyo. He is currently guest professor for Kyoto University of Art & Design, a member of Japanese Art Society of America, Director for The Adachi Foundation and a Director for the International Ukiyo-e Society.

Johnny Waldman（Founder of Spoon & Tamago)

Johnny Waldman is the founder of Spoon & Tamago, an international blog that is based out of New York City and Tokyo, Japan. Waldman was born in Brooklyn but moved to Tokyo a year later. He spent the first 18 years of his life growing up in Tokyo where his parents taught English. He returned, for the first time, to the United States to attend college where he earned his bachelor’s degree in Art Education and his BFA in Art and Visual Technology. Waldman founded Spoon & Tamago in 2007. Using a unique background and international perspective, Spoon & Tamago attempts to comprehensively cover all aspects of Japanese design from fine art and architecture to product and graphic design with an emphasis on authentically communicating Japanese arts and crafts to the world.

Chelsea Foxwell（Associate Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago)

Chelsea Foxwell received her PhD in 2008 from Columbia University and her BA from Harvard University. She is the author of Making Modern Japanese Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images (2015) and co-author and co-curator (with Anne Leonard) of Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints (Smart Museum of Art, 2012). Foxwell has recently co-edited (with Wu Hung) a volume of essays on East Asian photography and is currently at work on a book that examines the origins of modern Japanese art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the recipient of grants from the Japanese Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation, Getty Research Institute, Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Institute for International Education (Fulbright Scholar).

Bradley Bailey（Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Curator of Asian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

Bradley Bailey is an expert in Japanese art, with a special interest in arts of the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa Periods. In the past he has curated exhibitions of Japanese painting, Meiji war prints, Asian ceramics, and global contemporary artwork, holding positions as a curator and adjunct professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and Amherst College. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the History of Art from Yale University and holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management. At present, he is working on several major exhibitions, including None Whatsoever: Zen Painting from the Gitter-Yelen Collection (co-curated with Yukio Lippit, Harvard University, with a catalogue to published by the MFAH) and a major touring exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Art Society of America, Meiji Modern: 50 Years of New Japan (co-curated with Chelsea Foxwell, University of Chicago, with a catalogue to be published by Yale University Press).

Joni Waka（Director, The Art Foundation Tokyo)

The Art Foundation, in an effort to keep alive the tradition of Japanese influence in contemporary arts and architecture has for thirty years provided spaces for exhibitions, film screenings, performances, book launches, promotional events, and residencies. The Art Foundation has produced events with little known names and institutions to such names as Gilbert and George, Francesco Clemente, Joseph Kosuth, Tracey Emin, Tracey Moat, Jenny Holzer, Yayoi Kusama, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles Country Museum, the Tate Gallery, Kunsthalle Wein, the Power Plant in Toronto, the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Venice Biennale.