Walsh Millette

Walsh Millette focuses on middle-period Chinese art of the Yuan and Ming dynasties. His approach is interdisciplinary and interregional, and his research engages with ideas of ethnicity, civilizational identity, and religion, and how these issues are expressed in representational and constructed landscapes. For his dissertation he is preparing a site study of the Daoist ritual complex located at Mount Wudang in today’s Hubei province.

Walsh came to Columbia initially as an MA student in 2021, studying as this department’s inaugural Burke Fellow and developing a thesis project that traced the influence of Chinese paintings of northern steppe peoples (fanzu) on Japanese works of the same subject. Walsh also holds an MA in Sinology from Peking University where he was both a Yenching Fellow and a recipient of the China Government Scholarship from the Chinese Ministry of Education. His work at PKU focused on early 20th century landscape photography from Xinjiang, and he has continued to explore similar projects related to photography. His research in this regard has been supported by The Image Centre in Toronto and again by Peking University.

Before his graduate studies Walsh worked for three years as a language arts teacher in Beijing. He is a practicing artist and holds a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), in Savannah, Georgia.