MA (Fine): MSU, Baroda; PhD: ANU, Canberra

Modern and Contemporary Art in Asia

Art and nationhood; art practice and belonging

Transnational and cosmopolitan histories of art 

Contemporary art's relationships with traditional practice

Art, architecture and urbanity

Chaitanya Sambrani is an art historian and curator working on modern and contemporary art in Asia, especially in relation to tradition, marginality and politics. Chaitanya teaches courses on modernism and contemporary art in India, Indonesia, China and Japan, and on art, design and urbanity. His major curatorial projects include Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India (shown at museums in Australia, USA, Mexico and India over 2004-07); Place.Time.Play: Contemporary Art from the West Heavens to the Middle Kingdom (the first contemporary art exchange between artists from China and India, Shanghai, 2010); To Let the World In: narrative and beyond in contemporary Indian art (Art Chennai Festival of Art, 2012) and All that Arises, a mid-career survey of the work of Lao-Australian artist Savanhdary Vongpoothorn (Canberra, 2019). He is principal author and editor of At Home in the World: the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh (2019), and is currently working on a monograph on the Riding Rocinante project of Tushar Joag (1966-2018) addressing water rights and futures across India and China. He leads the interdisciplinary digital project The "Wonders" that Basham Saw, analysing the visual archives of Professor A.L. Basham, in collaboration with colleagues at ANU, the National Gallery of Australia, National University of Singapore and the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

As Convenor of Higher Degrees by Research, Chaitanya oversees the MPhil and PhD program at the School of Art and Design. He is also the Convenor of the research hub Asia: Innovation and Transformation at the  School. A member of the ANU's South Asia Research Institute (SARI), he served as the Instutites's Deputy Director in 2018-19. In 2019, he was nominated Honorary Professor at the Fakultas Seni Rupa dan Desain (Faculty of Visual Art and Design) at the Institut Teknologi Bandung, and in 2022 was awarded 'Ganesa Widya Jasa Utama' by that institution. He serves as Curatorial Advisor at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Chaitanya co-founded the Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa.org), and was a member of the Network's inaugural Coordinating Group (2020-2023). 

Current research supervisions