Dessa Goddard

Asian Arts

Updated: 1.6.12

Dessa Goddard is the North American director of Asian Works of Art at Bonhams and Butterfields Auctioneers and a leading expert in this field. She received her B.A. in art history from Northwestern University in 1970. Her graduate training took place at Harvard University in Asian studies, where she worked closely with Professor Max Loehr in Shang and Zhou bronzes; she then entered the University of California at Berkeley program in Chinese history, where she is currently working on her Ph.D.

Goddard's language expertise includes both Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. She worked at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and later graduated from the Stanford program in Advanced Japanese in Tokyo. She continued working in Japan, completing a research fellowship at the University of Tokyo in Chinese archeology.

She travels widely throughout North America and Asia as an expert appraiser and lecturer in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean works of art.