About

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Sona Datta is a curator, writer and broadcaster from London. As an art historian and cultural collaborator she was previously Head of South Asian art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts where she extended the museum’s world-renowned 20th C modernist photography and painting collections to include the best contemporary art referencing all of South Asia. She exhibited and acquired Anila Quayyum Agha’s spell-binding light installation Intersections for this museum in 2016.

Prior to the PEM, Sona worked at the British Museum for 8 years where her exhibitions included the flagship Voices of Bengal season (2006), which attracted more people of South Asian extraction than any project in the British Museum’s history. Sona also radically redefined the British Museum’s engagement with modern collecting through the acquisition of contemporary art from Pakistan that linked to the Museum’s rich holdings of historic Indian painting. In 2015 she wrote and presented the BBC4 series Treasures of the Indus, described as providing adventure with engaging historical and cultural material, lifting the veil on the region’s past and proving you must know where you have been to know where you’re going. This has now been broadcast to a global audience of >90m.  In 2019, she curated She Persists at the 58th Venice Biennale, showcasing the work of three generations of trailblazing female artists from as many continents including Judy Chicago, Lynda Benglis, The Guerilla Girls, Anila Agha, Mithu Sen, Rose McGowan and others.

Sona graduated from King’s College, Cambridge University where she was awarded the Rylands Prize for Excellence in the History of Art and the James Prize for Creative Writing. Her new book is a radical revision of Indian art, which will reset the lens on the so-called ‘East’. She lives in London with her husband, two boys (and no dog). As a writer she is represented by David Godwin Associates. Sona is a fellow on the 2020  Clore Leadership program, identified as a UK future cultural leader.