Overview
Ayesha Matthan is interested in photography, urban studies, popular visual culture and politics in the Indian subcontinent and beyond from the 19th century to the present day. Her dissertation is titled "Looking for Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai: Photography, Identity, and the Working Classes, 1970s-1990s". She has taught a First Year Writing Seminar titled "Rear Window/Side Mirror: Looking and Writing the City".
She has presented her work at the Annual Conference on South Asia at Wisconsin-Madison, South Asia Program at Cornell University, Tate Modern, London, and Bangalore International Center in India and the IFA-Frick Symposium at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her essays on the visual politics of race, caste, gender and culture in the UK and colonial Sri Lanka have been published by Routledge, the National Museum and the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts (India) and DAG Modern (India). She also works as a Curatorial Assistant in Asian Art at the Herbert F Johnson Museum at Cornell University, where she has been responsible for the South Asia gallery.
She has degrees in Literature in English, Journalism, and Visual Studies from St Stephen’s College, Delhi; Asian College of Journalism in Chennai; and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, respectively. She has worked with The Hindu as an arts journalist, The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts as a research scholar, and India Foundation for the Arts as a communications editor.