Ph.D. Art History and Visual Culture, York University, 2016
M.A. Art History, University of Toronto, 2009
Master of Art Administration, University of New South Wales, 2000

Akiko Takesue joined the ROM in 2021 as the Bishop White Committee Associate Curator of Japanese Art & Culture, an endowed position. She is also an Associate Professor (status-only), Department of Art History, University of Toronto. She is responsible for researching and developing the collection of Japanese art and culture at ROM, numbering approximately 10,000 objects and ranging in date from the archaeology of the Jōmon period (10,000–300 BCE) to the present day. Her other curatorial works include exhibition and program development, acquisition, external collaboration, and donor cultivation. She is also building a vision for the new Prince Takamado Gallery of Japan, whose plan is being underway.

Dr. Takesue’s major research interest lies in the continuous history of objects—the processes where the object’s meaning and value shift as they move through time and space, and the agencies that are involved in such processes. It leads to her investigation on the global circulation of Japanese art outside Japan from the nineteenth century to date, and its impact on the potential discrepancies in the idea of “Japanese art” in Japan and elsewhere. Her PhD dissertation, completed from the Department of Art History and Visual Culture, York University, Toronto in 2016, investigates the continuous object history of Japanese ceramics collected by Sir William Van Horne (1843-1915) in Montreal. Drawn on the dissertation, she co-curated the exhibition “Obsession: Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese Ceramics,” at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, from 2018-2020, and wrote essays in the accompanying publication. 

Her interest in the impact of global circulation of objects on historiography of Japanese art also recently resulted in a journal article “The Reception of Netsuke in the West since Japonisme: Notes accompanying the translation of Matsuo Tomoko’s “The ‘Place’ of Netsuke in the History of Art in Japan”” in Journal of Japonisme, vol. 7, issue 1, 2022.

Dr. Takesue’s current research includes the cultural significance of the sense of touch in Japanese art—a critical component in creation, appreciation, and circulation of Japanese art, about which she is organizing an upcoming exhibition; the visual expressions at the time of natural disasters, about which she curated an online exhibition at ROM Aftershocks: Japanese Earthquake Prints (ongoing at Aftershocks: Japanese Earthquake Prints | Royal Ontario Museum (rom.on.ca)); and a joint provenance research of a group of wooden Shinto statues made in the 11th–12th century. She also looks forward to expanding her research areas into modern eras, in particular, the development of print media in Japan in the 20th century and their reception outside Japan.

While Dr. Takesue officially joined ROM in 2021, she was long affiliated with the Museum. After serving as a visiting scholar for the Japanese collection from 2001, she helped establish the original Prince Takamado Gallery of Japan from 2003 to 2005 as Academic Advisor. She continued working on different curatorial projects at ROM until 2014. She thinks that her time at ROM indeed trained her as a museum curator. Prior to ROM, she had wide curatorial experiences at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.