Roobina Karode

Roobina Karode is the Director and Chief Curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). Since KNMA opened its doors in 2010, Roobina has been steering the activities of the museum, working to make it a people-friendly place with a sustained and expansive viewership. She has curated more than twenty-five landmark exhibitions at the museum that include retrospectives of artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi, Jeram Patel, Himmat Shah, Rameshwar Broota, Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, and Arpita Singh, as well as thematic exhibitions such as ‘Is it what you think?’ ‘Ruminations on Time, Memory, and History’, ‘Constructs: Constructions, Stretched Terrains, Working Spaces and Delirium-Equilibrium.’ She has been the curator of exhibitions on Indian artists at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid,the Musee Guimet in Paris, and the Met Breuer in New York. Roobina is the recipient of the ‘Curator of the Year 2016’ Award from the India Today Art Awards and a member part of the Advisory Council of Vancouver Art Gallery. Roobina was also a part of the Center for Curatorial Leadership organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. She has represented KNMA at major international conferences and platforms, including Dhaka Art Summit, Art Basel, Hong Kong, and the Dubai Art Fair, among many others. Her focus in the coming years at KNMA is to generate ways of bringing art, education, and people together through forms of sustained engagement.

Roobina has a double Master’s degree, one in Fine Arts (Art History) and the other in Education. Roobina has taught modern Western and Indian Art History for over two decades at various universities and institutions, including the College of Art, the National Museum Institute, Jamia Millia Islamia University, and the School of Art and Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2000 and a Ford Foundation Teaching Fellowship in 2006. An educator, art critic, and curator, she envisions immense potential for evolving a distinct model for KNMA, the first private museum initiative for modern and contemporary art in India. Roobina was recently invited to curate the India Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.