Annette Juliano

Visiting Research Scholar 2015-16

Annette Juliano is a Professor of Art History at Rutgers University-Campus at Newark, where she teaches Far Eastern art history.  At Rutgers, she chaired the new Department of Visual and Performing Arts and also served as Associate Dean before returning to teaching and research.

Professor Juliano has also taught at Vassar College, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY), The Graduate Center of CUNY, and the New York University (NYU) Institute of Fine Arts.

After finishing a BA in Fine Arts at Rutgers, she completed an M.A. in Oriental Studies at University of Pennsylvania and earned a Ph.D. in Early Chinese Art (5th c.BCE to 7th c.CE) at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.  Her research and publications have focused on Buddhist and non-Buddhist arts in Northern China and Xinjiang during the four hundred turbulent years between China’s two famous empires, the Han (206 BCE-220 CE) and the Tang (618-906). In addition to numerous books such as Teng-hsien: An Important Six Dynasties Tomb, and research and reviews published in scholarly journals, Professor Juliano has been interested in the development of exhibitions to explore questions through the construction of contextual narratives.  Her well-respected exhibition and accompanying book-catalogue, Monks and Merchants Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, Gansu and Ningxia,4th-7th centuries, was co-curated with co-author Dr. Judith Lerner (Research Associate).  Through her work on the 6th c. Miho mortuary bed and examples excavated later, the significant presence in north China of Iranian merchants known as the Sogdians was documented visually.  A more recent exhibition  of Buddhist sculpture from the Beilin Museum of Stone Sculpture in Xi’an extracted from this famous collection  a few well-known and many virtually unknown examples of Buddhist sculpture grouped to provide a more integrated concept of Buddhist sculpture, challenging the established definitions of style and iconography to broaden the existing paradigms.

For her year at ISAW, Juliano will be working on a book re-evaluating mid-sixth century Northern Zhou Buddhist sculpture, overlooked and overshadowed by the neighboring Northern Qi Buddhist finds. Time will be devoted to new techniques and new approaches to understanding the many cache burials of Northern Zhou sculpture found during the past decade and the significance of their geographic locations, and to identifying sources of influences from Xinjiang and the dynamic between Northern Zhou and Northern Qi sculpture.