Jane Virginia Portal BA, MA, FSA (née Bowerman, born 1955) is a specialist in Chinese and Korean art history, and is Keeper of the Department of Asia at the British Museum.
[1][2] Portal was born in Mtarfa, Malta, where her father served in the British Navy.
After attending Maidstone Girls' Grammar School, where she was Head Girl, she studied Chinese at Girton College Cambridge (BA, 1978; MA 2000), and Korean at the School of Oriental and African Studies (BA, 1996).
In 2001 and 2002, she made two visits to North Korea, following the establishment of diplomatic relations, and started collecting contemporary works from the DPRK for the British Museum.
In December 2014, she returned to the British Museum, where she led the renovation and redisplay of the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery of China and South Asia, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in November 2017, and oversaw the redisplay of the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries, which re-opened in 2018.