Sonia Coman is a Romanian-born art historian and poet, fluent in English, French, Italian, Japanese, and Romanian. She received her B.A. in Art History with a secondary field in Studio Art from Harvard University, graduating Magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She worked as a curatorial intern in the Department of Paintings at the Museum du Louvre and provided cover artwork for titles in the Cornell East Asia Series. For her Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia University (awarded in 2018), Sonia wrote a dissertation investigating a set of Japanese aesthetic principles that spurred a reinvention of ceramics in late 19th-century France.
Her scholarship has been published in interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals, including the American Ceramic Circle Journal and the Journal of Japonisme (Brill). At Columbia, Sonia taught the Core Curriculum course, Art Humanities, and an undergraduate seminar of her own design, on ceramics from around the world that had been used as instruments of diplomacy. Concurrently, she holds a contractual position as bibliographer in the Editorial department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sonia’s interest in Japanese literature and the arts began in Romania, when, at age 10, the Japanese tea company Ito En selected one of Sonia’s haiku poems as the winner of their annual competition, featuring her poem on the company’s products. Humbled by this early recognition, Sonia committed to deepening her studies of Japanese language and literature and has continued to write Japanese verse ever since. Her poetry has been published and awarded in Austria, Belgium, India, Italy, Japan, Romania, the UK, and the US.