Kit Brooks

Kit Brooks joined the Princeton University Art Museum as the curator of Asian art 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 Institution, Washington, DC). Their recent exhibition projects include Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints (2024) and Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell (2023), the first exhibition dedicated to the psychedelic Japanese Fluxus artist Ay-Ō (born 1931) organized in the United States. 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 (Worcester, MA), among others.  

Brooks’ latest book, A Tale of Two Balconies, co-authored with Katherine Roeder, is a double-fronted, dual analysis of Katsushika Hokusai’s The Sazaidō of Gohyakurakanji and James McNeill Whistler's Variations in Flesh Colour and Green – The Balcony, examining the different cultural contexts for the production of each work and the use of the balcony as a compositional construct. Brooks earned their PhD in art history from Harvard University in 2017, with a dissertation focused on the materiality of surimono prints in the nineteenth century.