Nancy Yao, who has served as director of the Museum of Chinese in America (Moca) in New York since 2015 and has previously held positions at Yale University, Goldman Sachs, the Council on Foreign Relations and elsewhere, has been hired to be the first director of the Smithsonian Institution American Women’s History Museumwhich is at an advanced stage of development.
“Museums play a vital role in the nexus of scholarship and public access,” Yao said in a statement, adding that building a space to tell “the stories of American women will require intentional conversations, creative input and energetic curation”.
The planned museum in Washington, DC, which was officially created by the US Congress in 2020, should take shape in a site yet to be determined on or near the National Mall. Late last month, on the eve of Women’s History Month, the Smithsonian revealed that it had already raised over $55 million towards the project.
Yao saw Moca go through a transformative albeit turbulent time. Shortly before the onset of Covid-19, a fire engulfed the building in Chinatown which housed much of the museum’s archives, destroy or damage lots of materials. In 2021 the museum canceled a planned exhibit focused on Asian American art collective Godzilla after several members pulled out of the exhibit in protest at what they saw as the museum’s support for the construction of a huge new prison complex in the neighborhood. The cancellation did little to appease critics of Moca, who protested the post-pandemic reopening of the museum on co-chairman Jonathan Chu’s alleged complicity in the gentrification of Manhattan’s Chinatown and the museum’s alleged support for the prison project.
Amid these challenges and controversies, Yao steered Moca towards a ambitious $118 million expansion which will be designed by artist and architect Maya Lin. The project will more than triple the museum’s footprint and is expected to open in 2025.
“The last eight years have been difficult; anything that could hit us did,” Yao said. The New York Times. “I started wondering if anyone would see my potential value for another workplace.”
Yao will succeed June 5 to the museum’s acting director since March 2021, Lisa Sasaki. She joins a team of 14 working with a federal budget of $2 million.
In addition to the American Women’s History Museum project, plans to create a National Museum of American History and Culture in Asia-Pacific and one National Latin American Museum in Washington, DC are also in the planning stages.
