Andrew Maske was born in Denver, Colorado and grew up in Wheat Ridge. He attended Jefferson High School in Edgewater then chose to attend Oklahoma Baptist University, where he studied interdisciplinary Fine Arts. A year as an exchange student in Fukuoka, Japan changed his life’s trajectory, resulting in an extended stay in that country from 1984 to 1990. During his time in Japan, he worked on a Japanese television show while studying Japanese art history, and later applied to doctoral study at Oxford University, where he worked with the Japanese ceramic historian and curator Oliver Impey. At St. Antony’s College, he met his future wife, a Chinese art historian.

In 1999, Maske moved to the Peabody Essex Museum, where he became that institution’s first Curator of Japanese Art. There, he assessed the museum’s collection of over 18,000 Japanese objects, spearheaded a new design for the Japanese gallery, and created a major exhibition and catalog entitled Geisha: Beyond the Painted Smile. The show, which was also shown at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, grew out of conversations with elderly retired geisha Maske met while living in Japan. After returning to the US, Maske completed the book Potters and Patrons in Edo Japan: Takatori Ware and the Kuroda Domain, published in 2011.

An opportunity arose for Maske to combine an academic role with his museum background, and in 2022 he was hired to lead the newly established Graduate Certificate in Museum Practice at Wayne State University in Detroit, serving concurrently as Director of the institution’s Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology. Maske often returns to Colorado, where his mother and two siblings still live. In 2022 he collaborated with the Denver Art Museum on the exhibition Her Brush: Japanese Women Artists from the Fong-Johnstone Collection.