Karin J Zitzewitz

An art historian, anthropologist, and curator, Karin Zitzewitz is a specialist in the modern and contemporary art of India and Pakistan. Her latest book, Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991-2008 (University of California Press, 2022), traces the radical changes in artistic form after the liberalization of India’s economy. Across the 1990s and 2000s, an Indian artworld once dominated by painting began to support installation, new media, and performance, cultivated by a booming market as well as by new nonprofit institutions that combined strong local roots and transnational connections. By engaging the work of sixteen of India’s leading contemporary artists and art collectives, Infrastructure and Form articulates the connections among formal trajectories of medium and material, curatorial frames and networks of circulation, and the changing conditions of everyday life after economic liberalization. The book was awarded the 2021 Millard Meiss award from the College Art Association.

Zitzewitz’s earlier books are The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (Hurst/Oxford, 2014) and The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art: Stories and Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (Chemould, 2003). Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art, and the Fulbright program. From 2024 to 2029, she will participate as a senior researcher in the European Research Council funded grant project, “The Anthropology of the Future:  An Artworld Perspective,” with PI Manuela Ciotti of the University of Vienna. 

Zitzewitz’s work as a curator began with solo presentations of the work of Pakistani artist Naiza Khan (2013) and of Indian artist Mithu Sen (2014) at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. Naiza Khan’s “Karachi Elegies” was supported by a book published jointly by the Broad Art Museum and Art AsiaPacific. Mithu Sen’s “Border Unseen” was featured in Sculpture magazine, ArtForum, and BOMB Magazine, among other outlets. In 2017, Zitzewitz founded the artist residency in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State, a visiting faculty program designed to further critical discussions of race and identity on campus and in the mid-Michigan community. Nine artists- and designers-in-residence participated in the five-year endowed program, producing new works that were later shown in the Sharjah Biennial, ENTRE Gallery (Vienna), Commonwealth and Council Gallery (Los Angeles), and PS1 MoMA, Queens, as well as other venues. Zitzewitz has also written essays for catalogs for exhibitions at the Smart Art Museum (Chicago), Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA), Tate Modern, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Zitzewitz has co-edited special issues of Art Journal (Winter 2019), with Nora A. Taylor, and the Journal of Material Culture (March 2022), with Manuela Ciotti. Her writings have also been published in British Art Studies, ARTMargins Journal, Third Text, Visual Anthropology Review, Art History, and Journal of Asian Studies, as well as several edited volumes. She was Chair of the Editorial Board of Art Journal and Art Journal OPEN (2020–22), after joining the board as an at-large member in 2018.

Karin Zitzewitz received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2006. She served as a Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago and faculty member at Michigan State University before joining the University of Maryland in 2023.