Advocacy for underrepresented communities has always been a passion Yifan approaches with tenacity. In their current role at MOCA, they collaborate with the senior management team, staff, and Board of Directors to create Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility-oriented programs and initiatives that celebrate belonging, creativity, and connection. Yifan further develops partner-based strategies to build Museum constituencies by curating an array of cross-departmental public programs, amplifying BIPOC artists, scholars, cultural practitioners, and thought leaders, including but not limited to lectures, workshops, performances, festivals, film screenings, and artistic and cultural programming. They also oversee the Human Resources function and plan recruitment, orientation, retention, and performance review.

Yifan started his MOCA journey as a collections intern in 2015 and rejoined the museum in 2018. In the interim, they became a burgeoning museum professional and historian specializing in 20th- and 21st-century fashion and a specific focus on contemporary Asian art. They were 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.

Yifan is quadrilingual, speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese. They hold 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. They are 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. They were the awardee of the AAM’s 2017 Annual Fellowship of Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion and the emerging leader of the Bank of America’s 2022 Neighborhood Builders Leadership Program.