Claire Roberts is Professor of Art History and Curatorship in the Faculty of Arts’ School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. An art historian specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese art, visual culture, and Australia-Asia cultural exchanges, she earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1983 and Master of Arts in 1987 from the University of Melbourne, majoring in Chinese and Art History. She conducted studies at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute from 1978 to 1979 and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from 1979 to 1981, before completing her PhD in 2006 at the Australian National University, focusing on the modern Chinese painter Huang Binhong.

Roberts began her career as Senior Curator of Asian Arts at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, serving from 1988 to 2010. She held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Australian National University from 2006 to 2009 and at Harvard University in 2009-2010 and 2011. Since joining the University of Melbourne, she has been an Australian Research Council Future Fellow from 2015 for the project 'Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency, 1900s to Now', and served as a Visiting Fellow at the ANU Humanities Research Centre in 2021. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, she has curated exhibitions such as 'Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue' at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, 'Go Figure: Contemporary Chinese Portraiture' at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and 'Other Histories: Guan Wei's Fable for a Contemporary World' at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Her major publications include Fairweather and China (Melbourne University Press, 2021), Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters (Text Publishing, 2019, co-edited with John Thompson), Photography and China (Reaktion Books, 2013), Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong (Hong Kong University Press, 2010), and Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture (2012).

Professional Email: claire.roberts@unimelb.edu.au