Yasufumi Nakamori joined Asia Society in August 2023 as Director of the Museum and Vice President of Arts and Culture. An experienced museum leader, curator, and noted scholar, he is responsible for overseeing the museum’s exhibition program and collection, as well as arts and culture programming across the organization.

Nakamori came to Asia Society from Tate, where, from 2018 to 2023, he served as the Senior Curator, International Art (Photography). Nakamori led the development of Tate’s collection of photography as well as the strategy for representing photography in the program at Tate Modern. He curated the exhibition Zanele Muholi (2020/21) among others and advised on Asian and Asian diaspora art in programming, including the exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind (2024). In addition, he provided strategic management for photography in the programming at Tate Britain.

Prior to Tate, Nakamori headed the department of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, developing exhibitions of photography and time-based media within the context of a global encyclopedic art museum. He oversaw the exhibition series New Pictures and presented Leslie Hewitt, Amar Kanwar, The Propeller Group, among others. He was responsible for numerous key acquisitions which transformed and diversified the museum’s photography collection.

He previously served as curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2008 to 2016, and his exhibitions include For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography 1968 – 1979 (2015-6) and Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (2010) that won a 2011 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award from the College Art Association.

Nakamori has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and has taught graduate seminars at Hunter College and Rice University. He is a 2016 fellow of the Getty Leadership Institute, holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Wisconsin, an MA in the History of Art from Hunter College, the City University of New York, and a PhD in the same subject from Cornell University.