About
S O N A D A T T A
Collaboration is at the heart of all I do, curating, writing and broadcasting on South Asia's vast cultural production.
I cut my curatorial teeth at the British Museum. The Voices of Bengal season attracted more people of South Asian extraction than any project in the British Museum’s history and set a new bar for presenting living traditions. I acquired modern painting from Pakistan linking contemporary cultural production to the museum's rich holdings of historic Mughal art.
At the Peabody Essex Museum as Head of South Asia, the world renowned modern art Indian collections expanded to encompass contemporary art referencing all of South Asia.
My BBC series Treasures of the Indus (2015), now broadcast to a global audience of 90 million, is described as "providing adventure..and lifting the veil on the region’s past, proving you must know where you have been to know where you’re going".
In 2019 at the 58th Venice Biennale, She Persists showed trail-blazing female artists from four continents, including Judy Chicago, The Guerrilla Girls, Mithu Sen, Anila Quayuum Agha and Shirin Neshat.
As a writer I am represented by David Godwin Associates. My new book is a radical revision of Indian art, resetting the lens on the so-called ‘East’.
I am a Clore Leadership Fellow and a founding board member of Art South Asia Project.