Jerome Silbergeld

Jerome L. Silbergeld (born 25 April 1944 in Highland, Illinois) is an American scholar of Chinese art history. He was born in 1944 to Sabina and David Silbergeld. He received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1966 and completed an M.A. in American history there in 1967. In 1966 and 1967, he served as a United States Senate intern for Stuart Symington. He received a second M.A. in art history from the University of Oregon in 1972 and completed his Ph.D. in Chinese art history from Stanford University in 1974.

Silbergeld is the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor (Emeritus) of Chinese Art History at Princeton University and was the founding director of Princeton’s Tang Center for East Asian Art. He was formerly the chair of Art History and director of the School of Art and the University of Washington in Seattle, where he taught for twenty-five years. In 1996, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University. In 1999, he participated as a "referee" in The Metropolitan Museum of Art symposium "Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Art," donning an actual referee's jersey and whistle. He is currently a visiting faculty member at the University of Oregon, and received the Ellis F. Lawrence Medal for distinguished alumni of its College of Design in 2016.

His research includes traditional and modern Chinese painting, cinema, and architecture and gardens. Among his book publications are Chinese Painting Style (1982); Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang (1987); Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (1993); Hitchock with a Chinese Face (2004); Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (2008); and Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary x Art (2009); among his edited and co-edited publications is Bridges to Heaven: Essays in East Asian Art in Honor of Wen C. Fong (2 volumes, 2011). He has also published more than sixty articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews and co-authored the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on Chinese art.

He is married to Michelle DeKlyen, a clinical psychologist who focuses on early childhood development. They have two children.

• Chinese Painting Style (1982)
• Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang (1987)
• Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (1993)
• China Into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1999)
• Hitchock with a Chinese Face (2004)
• Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (2008)
• Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary x Art (2009)
• Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography (2009)
• Bridges to Heaven: Essays in East Asian Art in Honor of Wen C. Fong (2 volumes, 2011), editor