DETROIT, MICH.- The Detroit Institute of Arts has hired Birgitta Augustin as associate curator of Asian art in the department of the Arts of Asia and the Islamic World. Augustin is a specialist in Chinese and East Asian art and she begins at the DIA today.

Augustin has published on Chinese art and Daoism, Chinese painting (10th–18th centuries) and calligraphy in exhibition catalogues as well as in museum and academic journals in Asia, Europe and North America. From 2005 to 2010 she was research associate in the Asian art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she was a key member of the team that developed several major exhibitions including The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty (2010), and Silk and Bamboo: Music and Art of China (2009). Prior to her position at the Metropolitan Museum, she served at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, and assisted in the preparation of an exhibition on Ming dynasty painter Hongren at the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin.

Augustin’s recent research activities and field trips, supported by a number of top-ranking foundations and institutions, include the material culture of Korea (National Museum Fellowship 2012); Central Asia/China (Kizil, Bezeklik, Dunhuang, 2011); Chinese paintings and calligraphies in Japanese collections (2009); Buddhist and Daoist Temple murals in Shanxi Province, China (2008/2009); and paintings of the Tangut Xi Xia dynasty in the Hermitage State Museum, St. Petersburg (2008).

Augustin studied Sinology, East Asian, Islamic and European art history as well as Chinese language and literature in Berlin, Munich, Taipei, Shanghai and New York. She holds a postgraduate Master of Arts degree from the Freie Universität, Berlin and is completing her Ph.D. dissertation on Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) painting and calligraphy at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.