The leading curator and art historian of Mongolia, URANCHIMEG TSULTEMIN (Orna) was invited to curate the Mongolia Pavilion at Venice Biennale in 2015. Orna’s specialty is Mongolia and Tibet art. She served as an Assistant Professor at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture between 1995-2002. As a practicing curator, she has curated Mongolian art exhibitions internationally since 1997 (Tsukuba, Japan (1997), New York, NY (2000), Bonn, Germany (2001), Berkeley (2005, 2009), Hong Kong (2011), Shanghai Biennale (2012).
Prof. Tsultemin received her Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of California at Berkeley in December 2009. She has recently taught as an Associate Professor at the National University of Mongolia and as James Gray Lecturer at UC Berkeley since 2010 Prof. Tsultemin published extensively on Mongolian Buddhist and contemporary art, including a monograph Western Art of the Twentieth Century in 2002, book-length anthology Union of Mongolian Artists-2000 in 2001, exhibition catalog essays for Pori Art Museum and Kerava Art Museum in Finland in 2010-11; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in 2012. Her articles on Mongolian Buddhist art were published in Acta Mongolica (Mongolian National University Press, 2012), Japanese journal Arena in 2012 (Kyoto, 2012), in Vesna Wallace ed., Buddhism in Mongolian Culture, History and Society (Oxford University Press, 2015), in International Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and forthcoming in Mongolian Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2015). Prof. Tsultemin was awarded the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress in 2013, and a Research Award from the American Council for Learned Societies in 2014-2015.