Colin Pearson

As a PhD student focusing on Asian Art History, Colin Pearson is focused on three primary areas of study; Asian art, the theory and practice of museums, and the interface between artworks, technology, and audiences. He seeks to broaden his knowledge base and explore ways of reaching museum audiences in new and equitable ways.

Pearson has over a decade of experience curating collections of musical instruments, ceramics, artworks, craft items, and ethnographic artifacts. As a curator at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix for many years, he organized special exhibitions of custom-inlaid guitars and Chinese antiquities. He refined and expanded a broad permanent collection of instruments and artifacts from Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, as well as instruments from Europe and North America. Along the way he has collaborated with collectors, makers, restorers, performers, and curators throughout the United States and across the globe.

Pearson has also served as a curator for the Zayed National Museum in the United Arab Emirates, where he cultivated extensive knowledge of ceramics and other export goods from China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India traded along overland and maritime routes.

In 2022 and 2023, Pearson has engaged in several curatorial projects at Arizona State University (ASU), including an exhibition he co-curated at the ASU Art Museum, The Malevolent and the Serene: Japanese Tea Bowls and Prints from the Collection. He has also catalogued a collection of nearly two-hundred textiles, artworks, and ethnographic objects held at ASU’s Center for Asian research.

Pearson has given public talks and lectures on a broad variety of topics, including the musical and artistic cultures of Asia, connoisseurship and classification schemes, and the global legacies of cultural interactions throughout history.