Siddharta Perez is an independent curator, writer, and educator specializing in Southeast Asian collections of objects and material culture, working at the intersection of contemporary art and historical inquiry. She is currently based between England and Manila.
As Senior Curator at the National University of Singapore NUS Museum from 2016-2026, Perez expanded the institution’s exhibition program and archival holdings, synthesizing major donations of artists and art historical archives, and broadening the South and Southeast Asia Collection with contemporary installation, multimedia, and iterative works by Singapore and regional artists. Her landmark exhibition Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art became embedded in cross-disciplinary courses, influencing programming at national museums and generating subsequent temporary exhibitions. Further exhibitions include Rediscovering Thai Masters of Photography with Manit Sriwanichpoom in Singapore and at Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; the iterative solo exhibition Crossings by Wei Leng Tay; and 17 Volcanoes, presented at NUS Museum and forthcoming at Benilde CCX, Manila. From 2016 to 2026, she helmed the prep-room at NUS Museum, an incubatory curatorial model for exhibiting ongoing research and emerging creative practices with researchers, artists, university students, and heritage communities.
Perez is a member of the Editorial Collective of Southeast of Now, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to contemporary and modern art in Asia and its diasporas. She is a collaborator on the SNSF Ambizione Project Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures, and is engaged in initiatives examining ethnographic museum collections in Europe. She served on the Pre-Selection Curatorial Committee for the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, and has represented regional curatorial discourse across two editions of the Asia Pacific Triennale, Asia Film Archive, and CalArts' REDCAT film program. At the National University of Singapore, she lectured and co-convened the courses "Visual Cultures" and "Museums, Exhibitions, and the Curatorial".
She is a co-founder of Planting Rice (with Lian Ladia), an independent curatorial and resource platform, and a collaborator in Pulau Something, an online peer-to-peer study cultivating cross-border solidarities among cultural workers across Southeast Asia, and DOKYU, a group of artists, writers, and historians working with archives in personal practice.
