“Making Waves in Museums, Books and Films: Dialogues on Diversity and Inclusion”

Wednesday, September 27th || 6 – 7:30 p.m. || The Morris Museum of Art 

On Wednesday, September 27, The Morris Museum of Art and Augusta University’s Department of Art and Design are presenting Dr Sona Datta, who will speak about her experiences as a curator and writer specializing in South Asian art, the event takes place at in the museum auditorium.

Based in London, where she is a fellow at Clore Leadership, Dr Sona Datta is an accomplished curator, writer and broadcaster of South Asian heritage. British by birth and Bengali by ancestry, she represents the often under-represented and under-recognized group of South Asian females engaged in art curation, filmmaking and writing. Fewer than 10% of all those creating original scholarship within the field of South Asian Studies are female or South Asian.

An art historian and cultural collaborator, Dr. Datta began her career at the British Museum before becoming the Chief Curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts where she expanded the museum’s world-renowned 20th Century modernist photography and painting collections to include the best contemporary art referencing all of South Asia. At the British Museum, her exhibition “Voices of Bengal” attracted more people of South Asian extraction in 2006 than any project in the British Museum’s history. In 2015 she wrote and presented the BBC4 film series “Treasures of the Indus,” providing a sense of adventure along with engaging historical and cultural information. In 2019, she co-curated “She Persists” at the 58th Venice Biennale, which brought together the work of 22 trailblazing female artists from 4 continents.

A graduate of King’s College, Cambridge University, where she was awarded the Rylands Prize for Excellence in the History of Art and the James Prize for Creative Writing. Her newest book, a radical re-visioning of Indian art, will reset the lens on the so-called “East”.