国际知名西藏艺术史学者，美国纽约喜马拉雅艺术资源中心主任，纽约鲁宾博物馆前馆长及首席策展人，主要从事藏传佛教文物与艺术史的研究，尤其是唐卡的鉴赏与研究。出版有多部高质量的学术论著，并举办过多场西藏艺术的专题展览。2010 年受聘为我校客座教授，为全校师生开设出藏传佛教艺术的图像学课程，这在中国乃至世界都是首次系统讲授该门课程，产生了广泛的影响。

Mr. Watt, one of the leading experts of Himalayan art, acquired his prodigious knowledge of Buddhist, Bon and Hindu iconography from a longtime study of Buddhism and Tantra. As a teenager, he studied with Dezhung Rinpoche (Seattle) and Sakya Trizin (Dehradun, India), dropping out of school at seventeen to take monastic vows from the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa. For the next eleven years, Watt trained intensively in India, Canada and the U.S., with teachers such as Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche, and Sakya Jetsun Chimey. In 1985 he relinquished his monastic ordinations but continued to study and to translate sacred Tibetan and Sanskrit texts, along with completing numerous traditional retreats over years of periodic isolated practice, much of it in the rugged mountains of British Columbia, Canada.                                                                                                                

He is the Director and Chief Curator of Himalayan Art Resources (HAR), a website and "virtual museum’ featuring more than 65,000 images with detailed descriptions, making it the most comprehensive resource for ‘Himalayan style’ art and iconography in the world. When he began work at HAR in April 1998, there were merely 625 images in its database (Tibetan paintings only).

Mr. Watt provided CTS for the first time with a curriculum on Tibetan Buddhist Iconography, and gave eleven lectures on Tibetan art history.