Exhibiting Asia in the 21st Century

Hamid Naficy
Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University
Writing the Social History of Iranian Cinema

Hamid Naficy is professor of radio, television, and film and is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University, where he also has an appointment with the Department of Art History. He is a leading authority in cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media, as well as Iranian and Middle Eastern cinema. Naficy has published extensively on these and related topics. His English-language books areAn Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking; Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place;The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles; Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (coedited); and Iran Media Index. His latest work is the four-volume book A Social History of Iranian Cinema, published in 2011–12.

Julian Raby
Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art
From Privilege to Participation: Temple, Forum or Tower of Babel

Julian Raby is the Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art. Prior to his arrival at the Freer|Sackler in 2002, he had a long association with University of Oxford, serving at various times as university lecturer in Islamic art and architecture, chairman of curators of the Oriental Institute, and chairman of the board of the Faculty of Oriental Studies. A prolific and respected scholar of Islamic art, he is the author of numerous papers, articles, and books, including Venice, Dürer, and the Oriental Mode (1982);IZNIK. The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey (London, 1989); Turkish Bookbinding in the 15th Century, The Foundation of a Court Style (1993); andQajar Portraits (London, 1999). Raby takes an active interest in curatorial affairs, having curated In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000 and Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in the Moscow Kremlin at the Freer|Sackler.

Sebastian Chan
Director of Digital & Emerging Media, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York
The Digital Museum and the Evolving Promise of Digitization

Sebastian Chan is director of digital and emerging media at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York. He is responsible for the museum‘s complete digital renewal as it reinvents itself to reopen in 2014. Previously based at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, he is known for his expertise in open access, mass networked collaboration, digital strategy, and cultivating innovation in the cultural sector. He has consulted for museums and libraries worldwide, helping them adapt and change to the digital age. He was a member of the Australian Government's Gov 2.0 Taskforce, and serves on several nonprofit advisory boards. He has a former life as a festival and event organizer in electronic arts and founded Cyclic Defrost magazine. He blogs at freshandnew.org.