Arts Advisory Council
Arts Advisory Council
Faculty Director:
Jinah Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art
Jinah Kim teaches courses in the art and architecture of South and Southeast Asia. She received her B.A. in Archaeology and Art History from Seoul National University (1998), and M.A. (2001) and Ph.D. (2006) in History of Art from University of California, Berkeley. She is a recipient of a few prestigious fellowships, such as a Getty-NEH post-doctoral fellowship (2012-2013), a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the Institute of Advanced Study (Member in the School of Historical Studies, 2009-2010), a research grant from Asian Cultural Council (Ford Foundation Fellow, 2005), and a Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (2003-2004). Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, she served as an assistant professor of South Asian art at Vanderbilt University and Rutgers the State University of New Jersey.
Professor Kim’s research and teaching interests cover a broad range of topics with special interests in intertextuality of text-image relationship, art and politics, female representations and patronage, issues regarding re-appropriation of sacred objects, and post-colonial discourse in the field of South and Southeast Asian Art. From her childhood exposure to Buddhist art in Korea and a year-long stay in India as well as numerous research trips to various parts of South and Southeast Asia, she has long been interested in the materiality of sacred objects, especially that of paintings and texts. Her passion for learning languages and new scripts has been instrumental in pursuing an interdisciplinary research on illustrated Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts and Esoteric Buddhist iconography. Understanding people behind an object is one of her main research goals as an art historian.
Her book, Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist book cult in South Asia, was published by University of California Press in 2013. It examines illustrated Buddhist manuscripts as sacred objects of medieval cultic innovation that can be animated through the presence of images and various design strategies. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, “Garlands of Visions: Tantric Vision practices and Indian Painting, c. 1100-1500.” It aims to shed light on the Indic manuscript culture as it was practiced during the time of dynamic cultural and political changes in South Asia by relating the visual and material strategies of painted palm-leaf manuscripts to concurrently developing ritual strategies of Indic religious traditions. She is also working on a few research projects that examine the socio-political history of religious iconography in South and Southeast Asia. Another research project deals with identifying “visual vernaculars” in South Asia as they developed during the first few centuries of the second millennia.
Archan Basu and Madeline Wang, Boston
Archan hails from Kolkata and Madeline from Shanghai. They graduated from Harvard College in 1993 and 1997 respectively. Each received an MBA from the Sloan School at MIT. Archan is a Senior Vice President at Fidelity Institutional Asset Management. Madeline is a Managing Director at BlueWave Solar. With their 2 children, they enjoy discovering new artists on trips east.
Poonam Bhagat Shroff, Mumbai, India
Poonam is actively involved with Asia Society and sits on their Advisory Board. She sits on the International Council of the Tate, The South Asian Acquisitions Committee of Tate Modern. She also sits on the Advisory Board of Khoj which is an international Artists’ Association aimed at promoting inter cultural understanding through experimentation and exchange. She is a leading supporter of the Kochi Muziris Biennale where she published the Catalogue Celebrating India’s first Biennale in memory of her late father. Poonam has also supported the V.S. Gaitonde retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York apart from Loaning them a work. She was born and raised in Bombay and plays an active role in heritage conservation initiatives in the city.
Anurag Bhargava, India and USA
Radhika Chopra, New Delhi, India
Radhika Chopra is a collector and patron of Indian art, based in New Delhi. She was Founding Director and current Advisory Board member of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, (FICA) patron of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Advisory Member of the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute, Harvard University’s Arts Council. She has supported various projects including My East is Your West, a collateral event at the Venice Biennale 2015, and Word. Sound. Power, a collaboration between the Tate Modern and Khoj International Artists’ Association in 2013. She is the founder of luxury tea brand No. 3 Clive Road.
Sunil Hirani, USA
Sunil is a financial innovator, reinventing the way markets operate with remarkable success — not once, but several times. Over the past 15 years, Sunil has led several successful technology start-ups that have operated on the leading edge of technology and modernized and transformed financial trading. In 2018, Sunil co-founded trueDigital Holdings, a start-up regulated digital asset exchange platform. An early blockchain investor, Sunil co-founded Digital Asset Holdings in 2014, a pioneer in the development of technology to enhance efficiency, transparency, compliance, and settlement of financial assets using distributed cryptographic ledgers.
Three years earlier, he founded trueEX, an automated trading platform for the global derivatives market. trueEX is a 2017 Global Capital award winner for Swap Executive Facility of the Year — RFQ, a 2017 Risk Awards winner for OTC Trading Platform of the Year, and a 2017 FStech award winner for Best Trading Platform. Since its launch in 2014, the platform has executed more than $20 trillion notional and more than $10 trillion in processing volumes. Sunil was also CEO of Creditex, co-founding the firm in 1999 and selling it to Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in 2008.
He was also a co-founder of T-Zero, which was sold alongside Creditex to ICE. While at Creditex, Sunil led the acquisition of The Clearing Corporation, which allowed ICE to clear credit derivatives globally. Prior to Creditex, he was in the swaps and derivatives area at Deutsche Bank and Bankers Trust. Sunil received an M.M. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management (1994) and a B.S. from Washington University (1988).
Shanay Jhaveri, New York, Advisor
Shanay Jhaveri is a graduate of Brown University, and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art. He is currently the Assistant Curator of International Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His recent exhibitions include Companionable Silences (2013) at the Palais de Tokyo, Everything we do is music (2017) at the Drawing Room, and film programs for the Dhaka Art Summit, the Film at Lincoln Center, and Tate Modern. His books include Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design, Outsider Films on India: 1950–1990, and America: Films from Elsewhere. He has published widely in various art journals. Jhaveri organized the 2018 Roof Commission, Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace, and curated Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer in 2019.
Chair:
Dipti Mathur, California (Executive Council)
Dipti Mathur is biochemist turned collector of contemporary South Asian art. She has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and has performed post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has served on the Board of Trustees of the Seattle Art Museum and the San Jose Museum of Art, on the Collections Committee of the Asia Society Museum, New York, on the Contemporary Art Advisory Panel of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and was a founding member of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium, San Francisco.
Dipti currently serves on the Board of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, on the SFAAM’s Collections Committee, and is co-chair of NOVA, the SFAAM’s contemporary art initiative. She is on the Executive Council of the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University and chairs their Arts Council and chairs the Arts Advisory Board of the Institute of South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She also assists the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Seattle Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Asia Society Museum in New York on building their collections of contemporary South Asian art.
Dipti is a supporter of the Hawai’i Contemporary and underwrote the exhibit of renown contemporary artist Chitra Ganesh at the Hawai’i Triennial, 2022. Her ongoing focus is on working with key institutions in the US – universities and museums, in particular – in deepening their understanding of the contemporary culture of South Asia and expanding their engagement with it. Dipti lives in Palo Alto with her husband, Rakesh.
Bharti Malkani, New York City
Bharti Malkani is a New York-based art collector, philanthropist, angel investor, and real estate agent and advisor. She earned her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and began her career in Investor Relations representing small-cap, publicly traded technology companies to the investing community. After several years, Bharti left the corporate world for entrepreneurial pursuits and now supports other entrepreneurs as an angel investor in several women-led start-ups and through private equity investments. Additionally, she is a NYC licensed real estate salesperson and advisor with Manhattan Boutique Real Estate. Bharti believes in the transformative power of education and has been championing systemic education reform in her native India for many years through her work as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Akanksha Education Fund. Her art collecting journey started in the late 1990s and her primary focus is on Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art.
Chandrika Pathak, UK and India
Sanjay and Pinky Reddy, India
G V Sanjay Reddy is the Vice Chairman of GVK, a conglomerate with interests in Energy, Airports, Transportation, Resources, Real Estate, Hospitality and Life Sciences. He was instrumental in making GVK the largest private airport operator in India, by owning, developing and operating the Mumbai and Bengaluru airports, which handle over 50 million passengers per year. He founded GVK Biosciences, which is one of Asia’s largest contract research organizations, employing more than 2000 scientists. He is involved with GVK EMRI 108 service, which is the world’s largest ambulance service offered free of cost to over 800 million people across India, having saved more than one million lives until date. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an active contributor to the industry and the community through leadership positions at premier forums such as the World Economic Forum and the Jagdish and Kamala Mittal Museum of Indian Art, and is Chairman of the National Committee on Infrastructure at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), India’s premier business association. A successful entrepreneur with interests in diverse and challenging fields such as retail, infrastructure, hospitality, and social enterprises, Aparna Reddy has been actively engaged in wide-ranging activities and businesses. She has been Managing Director of Lotus House Group, Aparna Foundation, FICCI FLO, Hyderabad 10K run, Young Indians, Indian School of Business (ISB), and Young Presidents Organization (YPO). She has also associated with and organized fundraising events for charitable institutions such as CRY, Save the Child, and established her own charitable trust, ‘Aparna Foundation,’ which is committed to supporting less privileged artisans of traditional and dying Indian art forms. Her passion for art, nature, and local food has led her to be involved in projects such as the art installations at the Mumbai Airport, and she is currently working on the Garden Concept for Bangalore Airport Terminal. She has completed various business management courses at Harvard University in Cambridge and ISB in Hyderabad.
Omar Saeed, Pakistan
Mr. Omar Saeed has been the Chief Executive Officer of Service Industries Ltd. since July 31, 2011. Mr. Saeed served as Chief Operating Officer of Premier BPO Inc. He ran Service Sales Corporation as Chief Operating Officer from 2002 to 2010. He founded Ovex Technologies (Private) Limited in 2003 and served as its Chief Executive Officer. He was an early stage employee at Homewarehouse.com which was acquired by Walmart. He has also worked for a supply chain company that
Sana Rezwan Sait, New York
Sana Rezwan Sait is the Director of The Art Lab, where she consults for a range of blue chip and non-profit organizations and institutions. She specializes in Business Development, Partnerships, and Events with knowledge of the contemporary art market. Sana is a Committee Member of the Magic Bus Foundation and a Circle Benefactor of The Asia Society and sits on the Art’s Council at the Dia Foundation. She is a young collector of South Asian Contemporary Art and lives and works in New York.
Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Rajeeb Samdani is the Co-Founder and a Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation and is the Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group, one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Golden Harvest is involved in several sectors including: Food Processing, Dairy, Commodities, Logistics, Information Technology, Real Estate, Aviation, Infra-structure Development, Banking and Insurance. He is also the Chairman of UAE-base financial institution, Gulf International Finance Limited. In addition to his philanthropy with Art, Rajeeb is the Secretary General of Bangladesh Human Rights Foundation, one of the largest Human Rights organisations in the country, and the founder of TAC Charitable Hospital and the Alvina Samdani Trust. Rajeeb is an ardent collector of contemporary art and began collecting with his wife Nadia Samdani, with whom he founded the Samdani Art Foundation in 2011. Their collection was featured as one of the top 200 collections globally by Artnews in 2015. Samdani is the Co-Chair and a founding committee member of the Tate South Asian Acquisitions Committee, member of Tate’s International Council and the New Museum’s International Leadership Council. Nadia Samdani is the Co-Founder & President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of the Dhaka Art Summit. In 2011, she and her husband Rajeeb began the Samdani Art Foundation to support local artists and promote Bangladeshi and South Asian art in the region and around the world. As part of this initiative, she founded the Dhaka Art Summit, which has since completed two successful editions in 2012 and 2014 under her leadership. Nadia is a member of the Tate South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council, the New Museum’s International Leadership Council and is part of the Parasol Unit’s International Committee. Nadia is a second-generation collector and began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and also as a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Wall Street Journal ‘Live Mint’ and has been invited to speak about collecting at various international art fairs. Nadia has been named one of Artnew’s top 200 collectors and her collection has been featured in many leading international publications.
Shilpa Sanger, New York
Shilpa Sanger is an entrepreneur, angel investor and orthodontist. Since 2014, she has been a member of Golden Seeds, one of the nation’s largest and most active investment groups, seeking and funding high-potential, women-led businesses. She founded Rhea Arts in 2001 to promote emerging and talented Indian artists in the US and also collects South Asian art and functional art objects (collaborating with artists to create unusual pieces). She also manages the Sanger Family Foundation and Sanger family office. After completing her Master of Dental Surgery in Orthodontics (1986) from Bombay University, she held a private practice in Orthodontics from 1987 to 1999. She is actively involved with Pratham USA, one of the largest educational NGO’s and is a member of their Tristate Board. Her other interests are reading, tennis, dancing, photography, interior design and traveling.She is married to Arvind Sanger and they have a son and daughter, Aman and Rhea.
Gaurav and Falu Shah, New York
Osman Khalid Waheed ’93, Lahore, Pakistan
Osman Khalid Waheed heads Ferozsons Laboratories Limited, a publicly listed pharmaceutical company. He joined the company in 1993 after obtaining his undergraduate degree from Harvard and has since helped the business expand partnerships with leading pharmaceutical companies in the US and Latin America. Ferozsons supports several significant cultural and artistic initiatives, including a partnership with the Lahore-based National College of Arts (NCA) to establish an elective course titled Art for Humanity. The course requires NCA students of various disciplines to work with public health institutions, employing art as a means of improving the patients’ environment and the overall functionality of the institution. The company also hosts a national Young Writers Workshop at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan’s premier multidisciplinary university, to support the craft of fiction writing in Pakistan. Mr. Waheed is also the founding co-chair of the Lahore Biennale Foundation, a non-profit in the arts. The Foundation held its first edition of the Lahore Biennale in March 2018. The two-week event exhibited 53 artists from 11 countries, and attracted approximately 250,000 visitors.
To learn more about joining the Arts Advisory Council, contact Executive Director Hitesh Hathi: hiteshmhathi@fas.harvard.edu.