Bio

Swagato Chakravorty (he/him) is an Indian American curator and critic whose work ranges across modern and contemporary art and visual culture, focusing on cross-cultural and diasporic contexts, especially in relation to the Global South. He is currently completing his PhD at Yale University. Most recently, he was the Daniel W. Dietrich II Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), where he co-curated Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi –– A Marvellous Entanglement (with a newly-commissioned performance) and organized Day With(out) Art 2022: Being and Belonging in collaboration with Visual AIDS, as well as several time-based media installations. Previously at the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, New York, and the New Museum, he assisted with numerous exhibitions, including Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done; Bruce Conner: It's All True; Jonas Mekas: The Camera was Always Running; Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel; and Nari Ward: We the People. He has published work on the reception of Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema in Western contexts, high-speed photography and the history of performance art at MoMA, Anthony McCall’s light installations, and the lens-based practice of Alfredo Jaar.

His dissertation focuses on post-1989 art by African, Latin American, and South Asian diasporic artists in dialogue with American and European modernisms. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the US Department of Education.

Here are some of his publications.