
Willemijn received Bachelor degrees in both Archaeology and Chinese Studies from Leiden University. After finishing her Master in Sinology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London), she worked as a trainee curator of Chinese collections at the British Museum and Bristol Museum and Art Gallery focusing on ceramics and glass. Thereafter she continued in Bristol as project curator for the permanent redisplay of the collection of Ming ceramics (1368-1644). She is currently finishing her PhD dissertation at the University of Amsterdam on the role of material culture in the development of images and ideas of China in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.