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Michael Sullivan was a Canadian-born British art historian and collector, and one of the major Western pioneers in the field of modern Chinese art history and criticism.
Sullivan was born in Toronto, Canada, and moved to England at the age of three. He was the youngest of five children of Alan Sullivan, a Canadian mining engineer turned novelist and his wife Elisabeth. Sullivan was a graduate of Rugby School and graduated from the University of Cambridge in architecture in 1939. He was in China from 1940–1946 with the International and Chinese Red Cross followed by teaching and doing museum work in Chengdu, where he met and married Wu Huan, a biologist who gave up her career to work with him.
He received a PhD from Harvard University and a post-doctoral Bollingen Fellowship. He subsequently taught in the University of Singapore, and returned to London in the 1960s to teach at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Then he became Head of the Department of Oriental Art at the Stanford University from 1966 to 1984, before settling in the University of Oxford as a Fellow by Special Election at St Catherine's College, Oxford. He lived in Oxford, England.
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