Mia Mochizuki
Mia M. Mochizuki is a historian of Renaissance and Baroque art. She retired from teaching after holding a tenured professorship at New York University Institute of Fine Arts and NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research began in Dutch Reformation art and has come full circle to the Northern landscape. She was an early scholar of global art, focusing on the circulation of the Netherlandish print through Iberian trade routes, Japanese–Western artistic exchange, and worldwide Jesuit visual culture.
She is the author of three monographs: Jesuit Art (2022); グローバル時代の夜明け: 日欧文化の出会い・交錯とその残照, 1541–1853 (Dawn of a Global Age: Visual Dialogue between Edo Japan and the West, 1541–1853, with 小林頼子, Kobayashi-Sato Yoriko, 2017); and the prize-winning Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age (2008). She has also edited six anthologies and one exhibition catalogue—including Palimpsests of Religious Encounter in Asia, 1500–1800 (with I.G. Županov, 2025); Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature (with C. Göttler, 2023); The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art (with C. Göttler, 2018); and In His Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias (with A. Golahny and L. Vergara, 2006)—and published almost forty articles.
Her ground-breaking research has been shaped by her unusual background: she was born in Tokyo, educated at Sacred Heart schools and Groton School, and trained as a historian of seventeenth-century Dutch art at Vassar College (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. 2001). While her brother, Shinichi Mochizuki, is a mathematician in Japan (Kyoto University), she maintains an active agenda as an independent scholar based in New York, where she continues to write for academic audiences, consult for public museums, and collaborate on multi-year projects in the US, Europe, and Japan.
She is the author of three monographs: Jesuit Art (2022); グローバル時代の夜明け: 日欧文化の出会い・交錯とその残照, 1541–1853 (Dawn of a Global Age: Visual Dialogue between Edo Japan and the West, 1541–1853, with 小林頼子, Kobayashi-Sato Yoriko, 2017); and the prize-winning Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age (2008). She has also edited six anthologies and one exhibition catalogue—including Palimpsests of Religious Encounter in Asia, 1500–1800 (with I.G. Županov, 2025); Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature (with C. Göttler, 2023); The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art (with C. Göttler, 2018); and In His Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias (with A. Golahny and L. Vergara, 2006)—and published almost forty articles.
Her ground-breaking research has been shaped by her unusual background: she was born in Tokyo, educated at Sacred Heart schools and Groton School, and trained as a historian of seventeenth-century Dutch art at Vassar College (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. 2001). While her brother, Shinichi Mochizuki, is a mathematician in Japan (Kyoto University), she maintains an active agenda as an independent scholar based in New York, where she continues to write for academic audiences, consult for public museums, and collaborate on multi-year projects in the US, Europe, and Japan.
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Monographs by Mia Mochizuki
Focusing on the Great or St. Bavo Church in Haarlem, this interdisciplinary book draws on art history, history and theology to look at the impact of iconoclasm and reformation on the process of image-making in the early modern Netherlands. The new objects that began to appear in the early Dutch Reformed Church signaled a dramatic change in the form, function and patronage of church art and testified to new roles for church, government, guild and resident. Each chapter in the book introduces a major theme of the nascent Protestant church interior—the Word made material, the Word made memorial and the Word made manifest—which is then explored through the painting, sculpture and architecture of the early Dutch Reformed Church. The text is lavishly illustrated with images of the objects under discussion, many of them never previously published, from the cameras of prize-winning photographers Tjeerd Frederikse and E.A. van Voorden.
This book unveils, defines and reproduces a host of images previously unaddressed by scholarship and links them to more familiar and long studied Dutch paintings. It provides a religious art companion to general studies of Dutch Golden Age art and lends greater depth to our understanding of iconoclasm, as well as the way in which cultural artifacts and religious material culture reflect and help to shape the values of a community.
Taking up the challenge of an unusual category of objects for visual analysis, this innovative study invites readers to acknowledge iconoclasm not only for its destructive force, but for its generative power and the remarkable creativity it unleashed.
Edited Anthologies by Mia Mochizuki
Exhibition Catalogue by Mia Mochizuki
Selected Articles by Mia Mochizuki