Annette Juliano is 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 engaged 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.
In mid-March of 2016 after a five year effort, an exhibition that Juliano co-curated for the China Institute Gallery, Art in the Time of Chaos, Masterworks from Six Dynasties China 3rd – 6th Centuries opened at Honolulu Museum of Fine Arts, followed by an opening in late September at the China Institute’s new quarters In lower Manhattan. The accompanying catalog contains an essay, “Buddhist Sculpture: Innovation, Invention, and Imagination,” contributed by Juliano. This exhibition has received significant media attention with a full-page review in the New York Times and another in the Wall Street Journal. Also, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the China Institute Gallery, the New York showing was accompanied by an international symposium focused on re-thinking the Northern and Southern Dynasties.
Juliano has become a co-editor of the Inner and Central Asian Art and Archaeology Series, joining Judith Lerner and Sören Stark (Associate Professor of Central Asian Art, ISAW). This new series format replaces the former Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology (JIAAA) but is still produced by ISAW and Brepols. In the Fall of 2017, Juliano will give the keynote address at an international silk road conference at the University of Portland in Oregon.
For her year at ISAW as a Visiting Reseach Scholar in 2015-16, Juliano achieved significant progress on a book re-evaluating mid-sixth century Northern Zhou Buddhist sculpture, still overlooked and overshadowed by the neighboring Northern Qi Buddhist finds. Several Chapters will be devoted to new techniques and new approaches to understanding Northern Zhou sculpture found during the past decade and the significance of their geographic locations, and to identifying sources of influences from Xinjiang and addressing the dynamic between Northern Zhou and Northern Qi sculpture.