Forsyth Visiting Graduate Student Fellow
About
Ananya Sikand is a Forsyth Visiting Graduate Student Fellow at the University of Michigan as well as 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 2024-26, 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 online research platform post. She also 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 (2025). Most recently, she contributed research towards the exhibition Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies (2026-27).
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.
