She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1998. Her research interests include early modern to contemporary ceramics in East Asia and particularly Japan, East Asian trade networks, the history of archaeology and collecting things Japanese. She spent three years on secondment as a Visiting Professor in Cultural Resource Studies at Tokyo University (2006-2009). From 2009 onwards she is a Curator of the Japanese Collections, British Museum. From summer 2011 she is also Research Director of the Sainsbury Institute.

Prizes
2010
30th Anniversary Special Pola Prize for the Promotion of Traditional Japanese Culture
2011
Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation
Curatorial Experiences
2002-3
Kazari: The Art of Decoration in Japan from the 17th-19th Centuries. The British Museum (UK)
2007
Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan: Celebrating 50 Years of the Japan Arts Crafts Association, The British Museum (UK)
2011
Manga at the British Museum, The British Museum (UK)
2012
Art du feu / transformation de l’espace : chefs-d’oeuvre de la porcelain japonaise contemporaine, Vallauris (France)
2012-13
Objects in Focus: Water and Flame Pots, Ancient Ceramic Art from Japan, The British Museum (UK) and more
Publications
Jiki: Porcellana Giapponese tra Oriente e Occidente 1610-1760 (Joint Editor and contributor, Electa Mondadori, 2004)
‘Dining on China in Japan: Shifting Taste for Chinese Ceramics in 15th-to 17th-century Japan’ in Transfer: the Influence of China on World Ceramics, Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in Asia No. 24 (2007)
Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan (British Museum Press, 2007)
Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure by Hoshino Yukinobu (Editor and translator, British Museum Press, 2011)
‘The Dogû Phenomenon’ in Tsuji Nobuo, ed., Dogû Cosmos, (Hatori Shoten 2012)
Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval and Early Modern Japan, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012)
*She is completing a book manuscript for the British Museum Press entitled Four Hundred Years of Japanese Porcelain to be published in 2014.