Uranchimeg (Orna) Tsultem(link is external) (Ph.D. 2009) is a scholar of Mongolian art and culture with an active research and curatorial practice in global contemporary art. Dr. Tsultem received her Ph.D. in East Asian and Himalayan art history from University of California, Berkeley in 2009, where she also taught and served as co-chair of the Mongolia Initiative Program at the Institute of East Asian Studies.
Dr. Tsultem has also taught at National University of Mongolia, Yonsei University in South Korea (as a visiting professor), and University of Iceland. She is a recipient of several prestigious fellowships, which include the Indy Arts Council Creative Renewal Fellowship (2024-2025), IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship (2022-2024), Research Fellowship from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at IU Indianapolis (IAHI) (2020, 2022), John Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress (2013) and American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2016).
Dr. Tsultem's research and publications include topics on ancient stone monuments in Mongolian steppes, a thirteenth-century Chinggis Khan's portrait at National Palace Museum in Taiwan, a nineteenth-century mobile monastery Urga (Ikh Khüree), art of 1960s in Mongolia and contemporary Asian artists' relationship to their art traditions. Dr. Tsultem has had a long curatorial career exhibiting Mongolian art internationally since 1997. She is an active scholar with six books published in Mongolia, in addition to her monograph, A Monastery on the Move: Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia, published in December 2020 from Hawaii University Press. She is Edgar and Dorothy Fehnel Chair in International Studies and Associate Professor at Indiana University's Herron School of Art and Design.
