Zhang Fan is currently the Jessie J. Poesch Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Tulane University, USA. She received her bachelor's degree from the School of History at Nankai University, and later earned her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Her main research areas are the art history and material culture of early medieval East Asia (roughly the 4th to 6th centuries CE), with specific interests in the cross-regional movement of peoples and art, artistic production in imperial borderlands, identity construction in the context of cultural exchange, and the intersections and interactions between funerary art and Buddhist art. She is currently revising her first academic monograph, titled Unearthing Migrants: Funerary Art and Cultural Encounters in Fifth-Century North China. Her research has received funding and project support from multiple international academic institutions, including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Centre for Chinese Studies, the Louisiana Artist and Scholar Award, and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. Her academic work has been widely published in journals such as Artibus Asiae, Asian Studies, Orientations, Arts, as well as Palace Museum Journal and Dunhuang Research in China and abroad.

Zhang Fan will be a visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Chinese Civilization at Fudan University from September to December 2026.