Forsyth Visiting Graduate Student Fellow
About
Ananya Sikand is a doctoral candidate in Art History and an affiliated student of the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and the South Asia Center at the University of Washington. She researches modern and contemporary art, with a focus on South Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. Her dissertation-in-progress, entitled “Muslim Unbelonging: Conceptual and Performance Art in Post-Independence South Asia (1970-2020)” reframes histories of conceptual and performance art of South Asia and its diaspora via the dialectic of belonging and unbelonging.
From 2024-2026, she was the inaugural Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Cities Fellow focusing on Bombay/Mumbai at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. At MoMA, she conceived the research and programming activities of the C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai group and co-edited the museum’s research platform post.moma.org. Most recently, she co-organized the C-MAP Seminar Assemblies in Uncertain Times as well as the CAMP Study Day and performance Reading Listening Seeing Bombay Tilts Down in conjunction with the exhibition Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP. She also contributed research towards the upcoming exhibition Nilima Sheikh Fractured Skies.
Sikand earned her MA in Contemporary Art and Art Theory of Asia and Africa at SOAS, University of London, and has previously worked at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, USA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA; the Siena Art Institute, Italy; and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum), Mumbai, India.
