Daniel Tham is Principal Curator (Pre-colonial and Colonial Singapore) at the National Museum of Singapore. He joined the museum as Assistant Curator in 2010, when he curated and set up in the following year the new Goh Seng Choo Gallery featuring the William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings.
Specialising in paintings, prints and photography, Daniel has curated special exhibitions at the museum like A Changed World: Singapore Art 1950s-1970s, and was centrally involved in the revamp of the museum’s permanent Singapore History Gallery in 2015. Daniel was the lead curator of An Old New World: From the East Indies to the Founding of Singapore, 1600s-1819, a special exhibition commemorating Singapore’s bicentennial.
More recently, he spearheaded the commissioning of photographers and filmmakers in documenting the pandemic in Singapore as part of the museum’s Collecting Contemporary Singapore initiative. This was presented in the 2021 exhibition which he curated, Picturing the Pandemic: A Visual Record of Covid-19 in Singapore.
