Natasha Coleman

Natasha’s research focuses on the visual cultures that emerged via the explosion of direct

contact between Western Europe and late imperial China from the early seventeenth century

until the fall of the Manchu Qing Empire in 1911. Multidirectional and heterochronic in

approach, her work uncovers remnants of geographic distance and temporal asymmetry inherent

to art created at the interstices of the Sino-European encounter and explores how artists working

at these interstices mitigated or highlighted such remnants in the art they produced. Reoccurring

subjects within her work include the visual rendering of spatiotemporal sequencing, race,

medicine, efficacy-based ritual, gender, and reproduction.

Prior to attending Harvard, Natasha received her B.A. at Columbia University with a major in the

history of art and archaeology and a concentration in East Asian languages and cultures. During

her time there, Natasha studied built heritage in Venice, participated on an archaeological dig at

Hadrian’s Villa, and received a travel grant to study early Eastern Han tombs in Southeastern

China. She went on to receive her M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the

History of Art where her qualifying paper, “À vendre in Darwin’s London: Jean-Léon Gérôme

and the Divine Thumb,” won the Clark Graduate Prize.

She also has worked on a range of curatorial projects including the British Galleries reinstallation

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Early Rubens exhibition at the Fine Arts Museums of

San Francisco, Legion of Honor, Ray Johnson c/o at the Art Institute of Chicago, and upcoming

exhibitions on thirteenth and fourteenth-century Chinese paintings at the Princeton University

Art Museum, and on the French painter, Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, at the Sterling and

Francine Clark Art Institute. Most recently, she was the 2021-2022 Joseph F. McCrindle

Foundation Curatorial Intern at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.