Khanh Trinh completed her studies in East Asian Art History, Japanese Studies, and Chinese Studies at the University of Zurich in 2000 with a doctoral dissertation on the Japanese painter Tani Bunchō (1763–1840). From 1997 to 2015, she worked as a curator and lecturer in Japanese art history in Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, and Sydney. Since 2015, she has served as Curator of Japanese and Korean Art at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. Her research and publications focus on the social and cultural contexts of Japanese artistic production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a curator and author, she has been involved in numerous exhibitions and their accompanying publications. She has also published widely on aspects of Japanese painting and decorative arts of the Edo period (1603–1868), as well as on contemporary Japanese and Korean art.