When it comes to curators and directors, the Cleveland Museum of Art has been like a sports franchise that frequently loses good players to rival teams.

In 2009, the museum's director, Timothy Rub, famously left Cleveland to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Over the summer, the museum's chief curator, C. Griffith Mann, left for New York to head the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval department and the Cloisters.

The Cleveland museum's latest hire breaks that pattern: It just announced that it has hired Sinéad Vilbar, the Met's assistant curator in the Department of Asian Art, as its new curator of Japanese and Korean art.

Vilbar will succeed Seunghye Sun, who held the post for a year before returning to her native Korea in 2011 for family reasons. Vilbar starts in Cleveland in January.

“It’s very exciting for me,” she said in a phone interview on Thursday. “Cleveland has a super collection. In my area of specialization, which is Buddhist art, the collection is tremendous.”

When asked how the Cleveland museum lured her from the prestigious Met, Vilbar demurred. She preferred to talk about what she called the "incredible quality" of Cleveland's Japanese and Korean collections, and the legacy of Sherman Lee, director of the museum from 1958 to 1983, who is largely credited with building one of the nation's finest collections of Asian art here.

The new Japanese and Korean galleries opened at the museum in June after those collections spent eight years in storage. A $350 million expansion and renovation will be completed in December.

Vilbar, 40, earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale University and a master’s degree and doctorate at Princeton University in the Department of Art and Archeology Program in Japanese Art.

She joined the Met in 2008 after having served as an assistant curator of Asian art at the Princeton University Art Museum starting in 2006. She also held internships at the Princeton museum in 2004 and 2005.

The new Japanese and Korean galleries opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art in June after the collection spent eight years in storage.

Born in West Chester, Pa., Vilbar grew up in Charlotte, N.C.; Chattanooga, Tenn; Austin, Texas, and other American cities and graduated from high school in Tokyo.

“I’m from everywhere,” she said.

Vilbar developed her interest in art as a child in Charlotte, where her father, an executive with a multinational corporation and an amateur actor, performed in plays produced at the Mint Museum, and where her mother was a docent.

“For me, the museum is where parents go to do things,” she said. “It was just this great place where I would go for classes for kids, and my father would act and my mother would give tours. So I’d spend time looking at the Ashcan [School] paintings or the Romare Bearden paintings.”

Many teens would be reluctant to move to a foreign country to attend high school at age 17, but Vilbar said she was thrilled to move to Japan with her family. She traveled around the country and visited Korea with her school’s cross-country team.

It was during that period that she developed a passionate fascination with Japanese and Korean art.

“I’d not had much engagement with East Asian art in general, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is great! What is it?,’ and I feel I’m still asking myself that question 20 years later.’’

Vilbar’s immediate responsibilities in Cleveland will include managing a loan exhibition from the Cleveland museum to the Tokyo National Museum, entitled “Masterpieces from the Cleveland Museum of Art.”

On view from Jan. 15 to Feb. 23, the exhibition will feature highlights of the museum’s Japanese art collection and from its collection of European paintings. The show will later travel to Kyushu National Museum.

The traveling show is part of a collaboration that involves an exhibition of works from the Tokyo National Museum on the development of Japanese modern art in the early 20th century, which goes on view in Cleveland on Feb. 16.

Vilbar said that one reason she’s excited to come to Cleveland is that she’ll have a chance to add to the museum’s collection.

“There are so many things I already have my eye on,” she said. “There are things I’ve had my eye on for years, that aren’t yet available, but that may become in the next five or 10 years.”

She said she’s excited about the challenge of maintaining the same level of quality established by Lee and others at the museum as she adds to the Japanese and Korean collections.

“Simply to have the opportunity to bring in pieces that say ‘this is the best that artists have been able to produce,’ that’s something with which I’m very much in tune,” she said.