Board & Staff

Edward Cheng, Director of External Relations

Edward was a financial journalist for over 15 years. He held senior management roles at The Wall Street Journal in New York and with the Financial Times in New York and Hong Kong. He has won awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia and Amnesty International for his video journalism about China. Edward first fell in love with museums when he started his own video content marketing company in Hong Kong creating videos for museums, artists and arts and culture nonprofits. He graduated with a B.A. in Broadcast Journalism with a Minor in Business Administration from the University of Southern California, where he endowed the Edward T. Cheng Scholarship in New Media, and attended University of Cambridge, England.

Kevin Chu, Assistant Director of Collections and Research Center

Kevin is the Collections Manager of the museum collections, library, and archives, which are located at 70 Mulberry Street. He is an avid comic book reader and first came to MOCA in 2012 because of MOCA’s exhibition on Asian Americans in U.S. comics, “Marvels & Monsters.” Kevin started off as an intern with MOCA’s Collections department, where he learned archiving and preservation techniques. He recently worked with the curatorial team to develop the special exhibition “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving.” In his free time, Kevin moonlights as a fiction writer, who ironically has only ever had his non-fiction pieces published. He has a B.A. in Journalism and East Asian Studies from New York University.

Erwin Geronimo, Facilities Manager 

Erwin has worked in the administrative services industry for 14 years, gaining experience in building maintenance, construction, space planning and corporate real estate with various private, public and non-profit companies. As a seasoned Facilities Manager, he is passionate about advancing operational and cost efficiency within growing organizations. Erwin has done work for companies like Intel, the New York City Economic Development Corporation and JP Morgan Chase. Most recently, he has been a full-time dad to his young son. Outside of work, he enjoys skiing, hiking, coaching little league and taking road trips with his wife and son.

Yue Ma, Director of Collections and Research Center

Yue Ma, Director for Collections and Research, has been with MOCA for nine years, and is in charge of the museum collections, library, and archives, which are located at 70 Mulberry Street. She oversees daily acquisition, preservation, digitization, research, and online projects. In addition, she assisted with the permanent exhibition “With a Single Step,” and recently co-curated the exhibition “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving.” She enjoys being a liaison between the collection donors and the museum. Prior to MOCA, Ma interned at the City of Toronto Archives, and served as a Digital Project Manager and an Associate Research Archivist at the Shenzhen City Archives. Educated globally, she received a B.Sc. from Jilin University and a MBA from Xiamen University respectively, then received a MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from a joint program at Ryerson University and George Eastman House.

Nancy Yao Maasbach, President

Nancy Yao Maasbach has served as the President of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) since 2015. As the President of MOCA, Nancy has the unique privilege of combining her experiences in managing organizations, promoting arts and culture as a bridge between peoples, and executing research focused on redefining the American narrative by examining the role of Chinese Americans in U.S. history.

Prior to her time at MOCA, Nancy was the executive director of the Yale-China Association, one of the oldest non-profit organizations dedicated to building U.S.-China relations. At the Yale-China Association, Nancy led over 20 programs in the areas of arts, education, and health. These programs were lauded as best-in-class and models for bilateral engagement.

Nancy has over twenty years of leadership experience at non-profit organizations and for-profit management, including staff and board positions at The Community Fund for Women & Girls, International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Tessitura Network, Goldman Sachs & Co, Council on Foreign Relations, CNN, the Center for Finance and Research Analysis, and Aberdeen Standard Investments-managed closed-end funds.

Nancy received her MBA from the Yale School of Management and her AB from Occidental College. She was an original member of the Here and Now Theater Company. She is a lecturer at the Yale School of Drama. Nancy is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lauren Nechamkin, Director of Education

Lauren Nechamkin is MOCA's  Director of Education. She started her museum career at the New York Hall of Science, as an Explainer in their Science Career Ladder program, which cemented her fondness for unconventional education. She is a graduate of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, where she earned her Bachelor of Science in Social Studies Education, grades 7-12 and her initial certification for teaching social studies, with a 5th-6th grade extension. She student taught at CASTLE middle school on the Lower East Side and the High School of Arts & Technology. She is a Queens native, Jackson Heights born and bred, and harbors an immense pride for both the borough and the neighborhood.

Andrew Rebatta, Associate Curator

Andrew is a Queens native who has organized exhibitions and public programs at community-based museums in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

Prior to joining the MOCA team, Andrew curated exhibitions and performances for the annual New Forms Festival of Electronic Music and Contemporary Art, Vancouver, BC. In 2011, he was Curator-in-Residence at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City. From 2009 to 2010, Andrew was the Program Manager at the Smithsonian Latino Center where he oversaw the Latino Museum Studies Program, and those same years was the Project and Outreach Manager at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. There, he conceptualized the education programming for an exhibition about the African diaspora in Mexico, and organized lectures and community forums about building black-brown coalitions in the DC metro area. Andrew worked again with the Smithonian Institution in 2017, and presented a research installation that centered around the history of Chinatown music spaces in the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center's annual Culture Lab, CTRL+ALT.

Andrew began his museum career at the National Museum of Mexican Art in 2004, where he worked in the Permanent Collections Department and curated two exhibitions about intersectionality within the Chicanx Movement and transnational identity in Chicago's Mexican community. He studied art history at Northwestern University.

Herb Hoi Chun Tam, Curator and Director of Exhibitions

Herb Tam is the Curator and Director of Exhibitions. He recently co-curated “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving,” an exhibition that explored the construction of Chinese American identity through MOCA’s archival materials. In 2012, he curated “America through a Chinese Lens,” which surveyed photographs of America by contemporary artists and non-professional photographers of Chinese descent. Tam was previously the Associate Curator at Exit Art and the Acting Associate Curator at the Queens Museum of Art. Tam was born in Hong Kong and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at San Jose State University and earned a masters in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Neil Wu-Gibbs, Chief of Staff & Manager of Special Events and Board Relations

Neil serves as a thought partner and trusted advisor to the president, who leads major special events, facilitates president-initiated projects, and manages human resources. Neil proactively identifies opportunities and supports efficient communication across the museum as the principal liaison to the board of directors and the associate board. He advocates for expanding the museum’s outreach to new immigrants of Asian descent and the Asian LGBTQ community through two initiatives, “Fashioning MOCA” and “MOCA PRIDE.”

Neil started his MOCA journey as a collections intern in 2015 and rejoined the museum in 2018. In the interim, he became a burgeoning museum professional and historian with specialties in 20th- and 21st-century fashion and a specific focus on contemporary Asian art. He was the curator of costume for the touring exhibition Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes, produced by Semmel Concerts Entertainment GmbH and Marvel Entertainment, and a curatorial researcher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s spring 2017 exhibition Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between and the spring 2016 exhibition Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.

Neil is quadrilingual, speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and basic Japanese. He holds an MA in fashion studies from Parsons School of Design, The New School; a BA with honors in fashion and textile management from Nottingham Trent University in the UK; a certificate in fashion curation from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and a certificate of human resource management from SHRM. Neil is an at-large steering committee member of the LGBTQ Alliance of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and a contributor to the LGBTQ Welcoming Guidelines for Museums. He was the awardee of the AAM’s 2017 Annual Fellowship of Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion.