Sayantan Mukhopadhyay is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Museum of Art. Most recently, he was the curator of As We Are (2024), a group exhibition featuring fourteen emerging artists with strong ties to Maine. He is currently organizing a midcareer retrospective of Portland-based painter Sascha Braunig’s work, opening in the fall of 2026. His show Precious: The Value of Ornament, which interrogates the relationships between historic decorative art objects and contemporary sculpture in the museum’s collection, opens in March 2026.
In addition to exhibition projects, Mukhopadhyay has helped secure important works by Ching Ho Cheng, Hew Locke, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Sahara Longe, Chitra Ganesh, and Anthony Cudahy for the museum, in line with his commitment to augmenting the presence of queer artists and artists of color in its collection.
Mukhopadhyay has previously held positions at the Getty Research Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Arrt. In 2020, he was a participant in the Center for Curatorial Leadership’s Mellon Foundation Seminar. He holds an MA and PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA with honors in Comparative Literature and Art History from Williams College. His doctoral dissertation, Making Space, Making Way: Queer Belongings in Indian Contemporary Art (1980-2000), traces a genealogy of queer aesthetics in South Asian contemporary visual cultures.
