Victoria Sung AB’10 MBA’15 is the Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). She began the role in 2023, following eight years at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. 

Sung’s path was far from linear. “When I was making career decisions, I always felt like I was zigzagging my way around,” she said with a laugh. “There have been many moments of uncertainty.” What has remained consistent, she said, is a deep belief in what art can make possible: for artists, for audiences, and for histories that might otherwise remain unheard. 

At Harvard, where Sung studied History, it was a junior-year seminar with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Ivan Gaskell that changed her understanding of the field. The class focused on material culture history: “writing history from objects.” You begin with an object, she explained, and ask what it can reveal that might not be visible through written archives alone.

For Sung, this method carried ethical weight. Written records have historically been “the domain of certain people,” narrowing who appears in the archive. Object-centered history became, in her words, “a way to tell different stories grounded in my interest in women’s histories and those of marginalized communities.” 

The seminar also introduced her to what a curatorial practice could look like. Gaskell, then a curator at the Harvard Art Museums, brought students into the galleries to consider not just the objects on view but the decisions surrounding them: why something is chosen, how it is installed, and what narrative that display contributes to. “That was really my introduction to what a curator does,” Sung said.

From there, she moved into art history, studying with professors including Jennifer Roberts before pursuing a master’s degree at Oxford. After Oxford, her next move surprised even her: Harvard Business School.

She describes it as a “crazy turn,” but a practical one. Encouraged in part by conversations with Gaskell, she realized that curatorial work is not only about working with art objects. It also requires knowledge of fundraising, budgeting, managing people and institutional resources, and bringing artistic visions to life. Business school emphasized a familiarity with these different skillsets. The transition from Oxford to HBS was “a culture shock,” she admits, but one that continues to serve her when facing “thorny problems” inside large institutions.

Before completing her MBA in 2015, Sung had already worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA as a curatorial intern and research assistant. Still, choosing her next step after HBS felt risky. While many classmates pursued corporate careers, she knew what she truly wanted to do was curate.

She joined the Walker Art Center’s curatorial team in Minneapolis, expecting to stay “maybe a year, two years.” She stayed nearly eight. “It was one of the best decisions I have made career-wise,” she said.

It was at the Walker that she came to understand how deeply relational the job is. “I came to realize how much of a curator’s job is about people,” she said. Beyond shaping narratives, the work involves constant communication: with artists, across departments, with partners, and with audiences. “So much of what I do is really about building relationships.” The goal is to ensure artists “feel supported in a space where they can then imagine and do their most ambitious work.”

Working with historical objects, she noted, can be “very quiet.” Archives do not talk back. With living artists, you have “this incredible interlocutor”—someone whose intentions and vision you can discuss directly. Her role becomes both supportive and interpretive: helping “bring their vision to life in the best possible way,” while creating what she calls a “two-way exchange” between artist and audience.

Curating also means persuasion within an institution. “Curators are storytellers,” Sung said, “and you have to also do that internally.” Budgets and logistics often challenge ambitious ideas. The work becomes helping colleagues understand why a project matters and “bringing people on board” so it can happen.

Compromise is inevitable. The question, she says, is how to compromise without losing sight of the larger vision: “How can we adapt an idea in a way that still stays true to the artist’s vision?” Sometimes working within restrictions “can generate more creativity.” Other times it requires persistence—“fighting for artistic integrity” day in and day out.

When asked what guides her at the start of a project, Sung does not cite a checklist. Instead, she returns to an ethic: “Following the way the artist works as much as possible,” and “telling their story in the most compelling way that I can.”

She illustrated this through her retrospective of Filipina American artist Pacita Abad (1946-2004) at the Walker Art Center. Abad created nearly 5,000 works but had never received a full retrospective, in part because her textile-based “quilted paintings” were long dismissed as craft rather than fine art. Sung sought “to make the case” for Abad’s importance while honoring the openness of her practice.

Rather than relying solely on the estate’s narrative, Sung initiated an oral history project that included collaborators, friends, and family whose voices “may not necessarily be included in museum spaces.” She describes it as capturing the “polyphony of voices” around Abad’s life and work; expanding how an exhibition can connect art to lived experience.

At BAMPFA, Sung brought a similar lens to her retrospective on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Though widely known for her 1982 book Dictée, Cha’s broader artistic practice had not been comprehensively shown at a museum since 2001. For Sung, it was time. She wanted to reveal the full breadth of Cha’s art and archives and demonstrate why her work remains urgent.

Cha explored diaspora, linguistic dislocation, repetition, and memory in the 1970s and 1980s, “decades before audiences were ready,” Sung said. “She was a real visionary.” 

When asked what feels urgent in art today, Sung resists narrowing it to a single trend. Artists are moving in “so many different directions.” Still, she returns to a guiding belief: “Art is a realm of possibility.” In a world that feels chaotic, art can be a respite or a call to action. It can be an imagining of futures not yet aligned with present reality. Museums, for her, are where that possibility becomes public.

That conviction predates Harvard. As a teenager, she spent hours in museums, learning history through close looking. “I could easily spend 7 or 8 hours in a museum if you let me.” Today, she sees museums as increasingly necessary in a distracted world—spaces where one can stand before an object and simply look.

For students considering a curatorial career, especially those anxious about unconventional paths, Sung’s advice is direct: “You just have to do. You have to make.” Curatorial work is about generating ideas, doing the research, and relating to people. Much of what she learned as a curator came through hands-on experience rather than formal programs.

She encourages students not to focus solely on larger institutions like MoMA and the Guggenheim. Smaller spaces allow emerging curators to take responsibility earlier, wear many hats, and learn through constraint. She recalled advice from Adam Weinberg, the former Director of the Whitney, to “essentially ‘get out of New York.’” Her decision to move to Minneapolis, before she had ever visited the city, felt risky at the time but became foundational.

Looking ahead, Sung describes her work as having a long horizon and remaining deeply relational. She stays in conversation with artists for years before projects materialize, letting ideas “percolate.” She feels no urgency to rush upward. “I’m doing the work that I love,” she says, “and it’s work that takes time and care and sometimes years of research.”

In the end, the through-line is not linearity but belief: in art’s transformative possibilities, in the importance of telling overlooked histories, and in the museum as a space where stories, once quiet, can finally be heard.