NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announces that La Frances Hui will join the Museum as Associate Curator in the Department of Film, beginning October 13. In this role, Ms. Hui will serve as a strategic collaborator in driving the department’s extensive calendar of programs, exhibitions, collections and scholarship under the leadership of Rajendra Roy, the Museum’s Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film. She joins MoMA following 15 years at the Asia Society in New York, where she served as Film Curator and Associate Director of Cultural Programs. During her tenure, she curated film series covering a wide spectrum of Chinese cinema, from silent classics to propaganda films to contemporary mainstream cinema and independent films. With expertise in a variety of Asian cinemas, she has also organized series featuring Japanese documentaries, New Wave Japanese cinema, contemporary Thai films, New Wave Iranian cinema, and popular Korean filmmaking.

“MoMA's commitment to cinema has always extended beyond North American centers of production to include work from innovative international filmmakers,” said Mr. Roy. “La's rich knowledge of Asian cinema, combined with her unique professional experience in program development and implementation, will afford us with critical opportunities to engage with a spectrum of moving image artists in ever more essential ways.”

At Asia Society, Ms. Hui presented retrospectives of directors Tsai Ming-Liang, Jafar Panahi, Midi Z, and Shohei Imamura. In addition, she curated a series of independent Chinese documentaries for Film Southasia, Kathmandu and was co-curator of the 36th Asian American International Film Festival (2013), a festival dedicated to Asian and Asian American film and media.

Her speaking engagements have included The Museum of Modern Art, Museum of the Moving Image, New York University, Hamptons International Film Festival, Margaret Mead Film Festival, Stony Brook University, and others. She has served on review and jury panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, International Symposium on Electronic Art, South Asian International Film Festival, and New York Indian Film Festival. Her writings on film have been published by ChinaFilm.com, The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Cinevue (Asian CineVision), and Asia Blog (Asia Society).

During her early years at the Asia Society, Ms. Hui also worked on presenting performing artists, including Eiko & Koma, Chen Shi-Zheng, Vijay Iyer, Michael Ladd, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Shahram Nazeri.

She earned a B.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University.