Chinese Art, Buddhist Art, Silk Road Studies
BA, International Christian University, Tokyo
M. Phil., Chinese University of Hong Kong
PhD, Harvard University, 1995

Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8156-264X

Dorothy C. Wong is Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. She specializes in Buddhist art of China during the first millennium CE, with research focusing on the intersections of art, religion, society, and the relationship between religious texts, doctrine, and visual representation. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form (2004; Chinese edition 2011) and Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission: The International Buddhist Art Style in East Asia, ca. 645–770 (2018; Chinese edition forthcoming), She has also served as editor and contributing author for several volumes, including Hōryūji Reconsidered (2008), China and Beyond in the Medieaval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-regional Connections (co-editor with Gustav Heldt, 2014),  Miraculous Images in Asian Traditions, vol. 50 of Ars Orientalis (2020), and Dynamics of Interregional Exchange in East Asian Buddhist Art, 5th-13 Century (2022). 

As a member of an editorial committee, she is completing two forthcoming volumes—Miraculous Images: Potency across Time and Space, and Miraculous Images: Activation and Agency— a pair of interdisciplinary collections featuring contributions from more than a dozen international scholars examining “miraculous images” in global contexts. She is also developing two book projects: Cosmopolitan Buddhist Art Styles in the Long First Millennium CE (for Cambridge Elements’ China-India series), and The First Image of the Buddha.

Dorothy Wong previously taught at Florida State University from 1995 to 1997. As a Visiting Professor, she has also taught at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Eötövs Loránd University, Budapest, and the Centre of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She has received fellowships from the American Association of University Women, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Whiting Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Humanities Center.