Elizabeth Horton Sharf

Elizabeth Sharf has a PhD in Asian Art History from the University of Michigan (1994) and is interested in East Asian Buddhist portraiture. Her dissertation features paintings of Ōbaku Zen abbots. She is also co-editor with Robert Sharf of Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context (Stanford, 2001). She has lectured in Asian art history at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2004 she curated the exhibition Inhabited/Uninhabited: Intimacy and Exuberance in Japanese Landscape Painting (Clark Center, Hanford, CA) and in 2018 she co-curated Ink, Paper, Silk: One Hundred Years of Collecting Japanese Art at The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) with Julia M. White and Jonathan Zwicker. She is now helping curate an online exhibition celebrating the 350th death anniversary of Ōbaku Zen founder Ingen Ryūki (Yinyuan Longqi) organized by the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of Arizona.