Mei Mei Rado is an Assistant Professor at Bard Graduate Center in New York, where she teaches dress, fashion, and textile history, as well as decorative arts and global art history. Previously an Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she specializes in textiles and dress of both China and France from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, with a focus on transcultural exchanges. Prior to joining LACMA, Mei Mei held research and curatorial positions at the Institut National d’histoire de l’art (Paris), the Textile and Costume Division at the Palace Museum (Beijing), and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York).

She has published widely in academic journals such as the Burlington Magazine, Fashion Theory, and Perspective: actualité de la recherche en histoire de l’art, and in edited volumes including Materials, Practices and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture (2021) and Arachné: un regard critique sur l’histoire de la tapisserie (2017). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Beishatang Foundation, among other organizations. In 2025, she published a book, The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court.