Dr. Melissa Chiu is the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery in Washington, DC. She was appointed director in 2014, after ten years as the director of the Asia Society Museum in New York. Chiu was the Asia Society Museum's first curator of contemporary Asian and Asian-American art. As a leading authority on Asian contemporary art, she initiated a number of major initiatives at the Asia Society Museum, including the launch of a contemporary art collection to complement the museum's outstanding Rockefeller Collection of traditional Asian art. Chiu served as a management panelist for the Center in 2013 and an exhibitions panelist in 2010.