Center Staff

Matthew McKelway specializes in the history of Japanese painting. His studies initially focused on urban representation in screen paintings of Kyoto (rakuchū rakugai zu) and the development of genre painting in early modern Japan, but have extended to Kano school painting, Rimpa, and individualist painters in eighteenth-century Kyoto. Some of these interests have converged in his essays on fan paintings, a subject of ongoing research. In his publications he has sought to understand Japanese paintings according to the physical and cultural contexts of their creators in order to discover the motivations, whether political, personal, literary, or philosophical, that drove them to make pictures in particular ways. He has been a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, University of Heidelberg, Seijō University, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2017 he was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

Midori Oka brings her background as a museum professional to her role as the Associate Director of the Burke Center. She was Research Associate for Japanese art in the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum where she worked on an exhibition of Edo period paintings from a private New York collection. Prior to being in this area, she curated exhibitions, organized symposia and public programs, and co-authored a sourcebook for teachers as a curator and a Freeman Foundation Educator for Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. She has also worked at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art where she curated the installation of their Asian art galleries that opened in 2014. Oka received her M.A. and completed coursework for a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas where she specialized in later Edo period painting.