Susan Bean curates, writes, and consults on the visual arts and culture of modern South Asia.  She is Chair of the Art & Archaeology Center of the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is an Associate of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. She was senior curator for South Asian and Korean art at the Peabody Essex Museum until her retirement in 2012. Previously she taught anthropology at Yale University.

Recently:

• Reprinted: “Calcutta Banians for the American Trade: Portraits of Early Nineteenth Century Bengali Merchants” (1999) in Readings on Modernism from 75 Years of Marg. Shukla Sawant, ed. Marg vol. 74, nos. 2 & 3, 2022-2023.
• Reprinted: “Gandhi and Khadi: The Fabric of Indian Nationalism” (1989) in The Textile Reader, second edition. Jessica Hemmings, ed. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022.  
• “Making, Using, Disposing, Remaking…: Sacred Arts of Re-Creation in Southern Asia” in Religions special issue Scattering and Destroying: On the Unforeseen Consequences of Collecting and Reuse in South Asian Art, Janice Leoshko,  Catherine Asher and Padma Kaimal, eds. 2022  https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13070657
• “Bengal’s Clay Sculpture in the 21st Century,” in Maker and Meaning: Craft and Society Revisited, Stephen Inglis, ed. Chennai: Dakshinachitra, 2021. 
• Discovering Early Connections Between Calcutta and the Newly Independent U.S.A., lecture, Rotary Club of South Calcutta, March 2020.
• On the Prominence of Terracruda Sculpture in Southern Asia, lecture University of Hyderabad, Art Department, March 2020. 
• Project director, All India Museum Summit 2019, organized by the American Institute of Indian Studies, sponsored by the U.S. Embassy, New Delhi, July 2019.
• Modeling a Future for Handmade Textiles, Bhutan in the 21st Century, co-authored with Diana K. Myers and Rinzin O. Dorji, Textile Museum Journal 26, 55 – 73, 2019.
• The American Moment in the Textile Trade with India, Keynote for the symposium Traded Treasure: Indian Textiles for Global Markets, 18 – 19 April 2019, Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.
• The Rise of People’s Art: The Craft of Raw Clay Sculpture in 21st-Century Bengal, presented at Maker and Meaning: Craft and Society, International Seminar, Dakshina Chitra, Chennai, 2019

Previously:

• Curated series of exhibitions in the U.S. on the art of modern India: Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after Independence from the Peabody Essex Museum’s Herwitz Collection  (2013), Painting the Modern in India (2010), ReVisions: Indian Artists Engaging Traditions (2009); Gateway Bombay (2007), Epic India: M. F. Husain’s Mahabharata Project (2006), Exposing the Source: Paintings by Nalini Malani (2005); and Timeless Visions: Contemporary Art of India from the Herwitz Collection (1999). 
• Brought the Herwitz Collection to the Peabody Essex Museum; created the first dedicated gallery for modern and contemporary Indian art in an American museum. 
• Developed PEM’s first gallery dedicated to South Asian vernacular and regional art, securing support from the Prashant H. Fadia Foundation and the Deshpande Foundation.
• Published Yankee India, on the early encounters between India and the United States. Curated related exhibitions in Kolkata for the city’s tercentenary celebrations in 1990, and at PEM for the 1985-86 U.S. Festival of India.
• Co-curated the 1994 traveling exhibition, From the Land of the Thunder Dragon: Textile Arts of Bhutan, with Diana Myers. The exhibition received awards for excellence and the companion book was reprinted in 2008. The Royal Government of Bhutan acknowledges this project as the source of inspiration for the country’s National Textile Museum and Royal Textile Academy.
• Held visiting appointments at Brown, Columbia and Harvard Universities and Wellesley College.
• Served as founding board member of the Textile Society of America, and president of the American Council for Southern Asian Art. Sat on the boards of the Council for Museum Anthropology, the American Ethnological Society, and the South Asia Council of Asia Society. Peer reviewer  for the National Foundation for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum Service, the Fulbright Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation,  the Smithsonian Foreign Currency Program, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center.
• B.A.  Brown University; Ph.D. Anthropology, Columbia University.

From the Land of the Thunder Dragon: Textile Arts of Bhutan, 2008, is available from Amazon and the Peabody Essex Museum Shop

Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after Independence, 2013, is available from Amazon and the Peabody Essex Museum shop.

Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 2001, is available from Amazon and the Peabody Essex Museum Shop.