Dr Alex Burchmore is an art historian specialising in the study of Chinese art, past and present, with a broader focus on travel and mobility, trade and exchange, and interactions of the personal and material. His career in academia and the arts has encompassed a wide range of roles, including curatorial and provenance research, publication management for the globally distributed arts magazine Art Monthly Australasia, and his tenure as a Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Sydney from 2021 until 2023.

Alex's first monograph, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art, published in 2023 by the University of California Press, traces the myriad ways in which artists from China have used porcelain from the 1990s to the present to shape their visions of personal and cultural identity. Most recently, he has edited and contributed to Material Selves: Object Biographies and Identities in Motion, an interdisciplinary collection of essays by scholars in Australia, the UK, and China interrogating methods of object biography through a transcultural lens and scheduled for publication in October 2024 with Bloomsbury Academic.

After completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) with the South Australian School of Art in 2011, specialising in life drawing and printmaking, Alex received MA qualifications in Art History and Curatorial & Museum Studies from the University of Adelaide in 2013, writing dissertations on the visual experience of death in Buddhist art and on the ethics of transcultural display. He then received a Prime Minister's Australia Asia Postgraduate Endeavour Award in 2014 to fund a year of language study and research at Beijing Foreign Studies University. He received his PhD with the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in 2019, working on the research now published as New Export China.