Atreyee Gupta is an art historian of South and Southeast Asia specializing in global modernism/s, with a particular emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual circulations that shaped Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onward. Her research expertise and interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and architecture, global modernism/s, globalization, postwar art history, global art history, third world art, global south, art and decolonization, Bandung, Non-aligned Movement, Cold War, and the atomic. Her current research engages with questions concerning decolonization, Cold War geopolitics, and transnational artistic exchanges, with special attention to India.
Her first monograph, Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India (Yale University Press, 2025), explores the aesthetic resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement in India during the Cold War, tracing their roots to earlier interwar Afro-Asian anti-colonial networks. She is currently at work on a second book, tentatively titled 1968: Art, Revolution, and Radical Imagination in India. Conceived as a sequel to her first monograph, this book rethinks “1968” not merely as a Euro-American phenomenon, but as a dispersed, uneven field of artistic, intellectual, and political articulations shaped by the global proliferation of Third World ideals.
Gupta has published essays in leading journals, including The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Third Text, and October. She has also contributed essays to edited volumes and special issues addressing methodological and theoretical debates in global art history, including “Is Art History Global?” (James Elkins, ed., 2006) and “Histories of the ‘Global’” (Artl@s Bulletin, 2017). Her work consistently probes how the category of the “global” is constituted across material, intellectual, and political registers in the long twentieth century.
Her academic collaborations include the co-edited volume Postwar Revisited—Towards a Global Art History (with the late Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, 2025), which reconsiders the artistic landscape of the two decades following World War II from a global perspective. At present, with Sugata Ray, she is co-authoring a book featuring a combination of 100 artworks and visual documents that trace the long history of the South Asian community, including artists, photographers, and architects, in the United States from 1492 to the present.
In addition to her scholarship, Gupta maintains an active collaborative curatorial practice. At the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, she co-curated When All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2020) with Lawrence Rinder and a team of undergraduate and graduate students. During the COVID-19 pandemic, with co-curators Al-An deSouza, Asma Kazmi, and Sugata Ray, she organized the born-digital artist residency Crisis Creativity: Mithu Sen and Brendan Fernandes (October 25–27, 2020) under the auspices of the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative, a program she co-founded in 2018 and co-directed from 2020 to 2023.
At the University of California, Berkeley, Gupta is affiliated with multiple interdisciplinary centers, including the Asian American Research Center, Center for Contemporary India, Center for Race and Gender, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the South Asia Art Initiative.
