Lee Talbot

Mr. Lee Talbot is Curator of Eastern Hemisphere Collections and a lecturer with the Art History Program at The George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum, where he specializes in East Asian textile history.

Before joining The Textile Museum, he spent two years as Curator at the Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea. He co-curated The Textile Museum’s 2015 exhibition Unraveling Identity: Our Textiles, Our Stories, the first show presented in The Textile Museum’s new home at GW. He was co-curator of the museum’s second major exhibition at GW, China: Through the Lens of John Thomson (1868-1872) (2015- 2016) as well as co-curator of Bingata! Only in Okinawa (2016- 2017), presented in collaboration with the Okinawa Prefectural Government. His other recent exhibitions include Stories of Migration: Contemporary Artists Interpret Diaspora (2016) and Vanishing Traditions: Textiles and Treasures from Southwest China (2018).

Publications include chapters on China and Korea in History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400-2000 (Bard Graduate Center/Yale University Press, 2013), Threads of Heaven: Textiles in East Asian Ritual and Ceremony (Sookmyung Women’s University Press, 2006), Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain (The Textile Museum, 2010), and articles on various aspects of decorative art and design history.

He graduated from Rhodes College with a bachelor’s degree and holds an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a Master’s from Bard Graduate Center. He is completing his doctoral dissertation on Korean textiles and costume history at Bard. He is a board member of the Textile Society of America and serves on the editorial board of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. ltalbot@gwu.edu, https://museum.gwu.edu/lee-talbot.