Vani Krishnamurthy is an arts entrepreneur and advisor for artistic organizations. Her performing arts and art history background, along with her natural propensity to execute, have allowed her to consistently achieve her mission: to increase accessibility in the arts and culture space. She has spent over 20 years translating, moderating, and communicating between artists and their potential audiences, working in management, programming, and curatorial capacities in order to do so.
Vani serves as an Associate at the Mittal Institute, overseeing efforts to increase the University’s engagement with South Asian Performing Arts. She recently started a non-profit initiative known as Arts India US, which is dedicated to supporting emerging Indian classical performing artists while elevating and amplifying the presence of these art forms in the United States. Prior to this, she founded and ran CoCo Gallery, a thriving company in the visual arts space that expanded the middle market for original art through a unique commission process. She serves as a Trustee on Women@NJPAC and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, offering her expertise on strategies to increase audience engagement through new educational and programming endeavors. Vani has worked with a number of major arts organizations in the past, including Lincoln Center, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian, and World Music Institute.
Vani has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard University, and she started her professional life at The Boston Consulting Group. As a U.S. Fulbright Awardee, she is a scholar of the Chola temple sculptures in Tamil Nadu as well as devadasi history. While in India, she honed her 15-year study of Bharatha Natyam by training with celebrated experts and performing around the country.
