Roxanna Brown

Roxanna Maude Brown (2 May 1946 – 14 May 2008) was a prominent authority on Southeast Asian ceramics and director of the Bangkok University's Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum.

Brown was born on a farm in Illinois, United States, and received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1968. She then became a journalist in South Vietnam, where her brother was serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Interested in Asian art, she earned a master's degree from University of Singapore in 1973. She married and made her home in Bangkok, but she was run over and nearly killed in a traffic accident in the 1980s, which cost her a leg and seriously damaged her hearing. Nevertheless, in 2004, she received a Ph.D. from UCLA, working on the so-called Ming Gap, a 300-year interval when China blocked exports of ceramics. A production boom across Southeast Asia resulted. Brown's analysis of ceramics recovered from shipwrecks of the period "revolutionized the understanding of trade patterns in the region," according to colleagues cited in the Los Angeles Times.

While employed as a curator by Bangkok University, she became involved in the investigation of the smuggling of art objects from Thailand to the United States, assisting U.S. Government agents. However, she was herself implicated in the possible false authentication of stolen objects, based on material found during 2002 raids on Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, and the Mingei Museum in San Diego. Brown was arrested on May 9, 2008 for alleged wire fraud when she arrived in the United States to deliver a lecture at an Asian art symposium at the University of Washington. She was found dead in her cell at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac on May 14. The charge was dropped immediately after her death at the facility.

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