Kit Brooks

Kit Brooks joined the Art Museum in 2024 and is a specialist in Japanese art history. Prior to their appointment, Brooks was the Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art at the National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian Institutions, Washington, DC). Their recent projects include the exhibitions Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints (2024) and Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell (2023), the first US museum exhibition dedicated to the psychedelic Japanese Fluxus artist Ay-Ō (b. 1931). Brooks also curated Living Proof: Drawing in Nineteenth Century Japan (2017) at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO, and Uncanny Japan: The Art of Yoshitoshi (2015), at Worcester Museum of Art, MA, among others. Previously, they have held positions at the British Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Boston Children’s Museum. Brooks earned their PhD in art history from Harvard University, with a dissertation focused on the materiality of surimono prints in the nineteenth century,  and received an MA from SOAS and a BA from University College London.