Nancy Yao has been named the founding director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, effective June 5.“I am humbled and elated to join the Smithsonian as the founding director of the American Women’s History Museum,” Yao said. “Creating voice for the stories of American women will take intentional conversations, creative inputs and energetic curation.”

In the year and a half before Yao’s selection, the history and culture institution where she served as president — the Museum of Chinese in America, commonly known as MOCA — has settled three wrongful termination lawsuits stemming from alleged incidents during her tenure.The lawsuits were filed by former employees who said they were fired in retaliation for reporting alleged sexual harassment on behalf of young female staffers at the museum. The two men who were accused internally of harassment kept their jobs; one was later promoted by Yao…

In her text message to The Post, Yao blamed the firings of the three employees who filed lawsuits on “severe budget pressures.” However, Yao gave MOCA staffers a different reason for the first dismissal, in 2019, of a popular program director, Joyce Huang, who was let go two days after she made a sexual harassment complaint on behalf of a 20-year-old intern, according to Huang’s lawsuit and The Post’s interviews with former staffers.In a meeting the day Huang was fired, Yao told staffers that the termination “has nothing to do with our financial standing. We’re doing really, really well,” according to an audio recording of the meeting provided to The Post by a former staffer.The intern — who worked in visitor services, a job that included staffing the front desk — also recounted allegedly receiving numerous “creepy messages” from Duong and being offended when Duong and Geronimo made suggestive remarks about her mother, who’d just visited her at the museum.One text message allegedly sent by Duong to a 20-year-old intern said, “if I was teenage boy I’d sent you a naked pic already,” according to two of the lawsuits and a screenshot reviewed by The Post.