• Nainvi_Vora_DF_2025_02

    Nainva Vora during installation of “Digitizing the Miniature: Mahnoor Hussain and the Spirit of Feminism  — Crafting digital narrative in classical Indo-Persian form", 2024, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Photo: Nick Dentamaro.

  • Nainvi_Vora_DF_2025_01

    Nainva Vora during installation of “Digitizing the Miniature: Mahnoor Hussain and the Spirit of Feminism  — Crafting digital narrative in classical Indo-Persian form", 2024, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Photo: Nick Dentamaro.

Nainvi Vora (India) is an art historian and Associate Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), whose curatorial practice focuses on feminist, ecological, and material histories in South Asian modern and contemporary art. Her work bridges rigorous academic research with institutional exhibition-making and pedagogical programming. She is particularly invested in recovering overlooked sculptural practices by women artists in post-independence India. 

At Delfina, she will research South Asian women sculptors—such as Pilloo Pochkhanawala (1923-1986), Leela Mukherjee (1916-2002), and Latika Katt (1948-2025)—exploring their material engagement with global modernism, feminist ecologies, and the Henry Moore (1898-1986) legacy. This will inform the development of an exhibition proposal for KNMA 2.0 titled Women Makers and Feminine Ecologies. 

She holds postgraduate degrees in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her curatorial debut, Digitizing the Miniature: Mahnoor Hussain and the Spirit of Feminism, was held at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2024). Her recent projects include chairing a panel on Science, Sound and Imaging at the College Arts Association Conference (2024) where she presented  Re-Imagining an Archive of the Now in Jitish Kallat’s Epicycles (2020-21), the development of the Audioguide for Purvaee: Evoking Pedagogic Lineages (2024-25) at KNMA published by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Her forthcoming publication includes The Politics of Materiality: Uncovering Pilloo Pochkhanawala’s 1978 Travel Journal for MoMA’s C-MAP platform. Her writing and exhibitions examine underrepresented South Asian artists through feminist and decolonial lenses. 

Nainvi was born in Bombay, India and is currently based in Delhi, India. 

With support from:

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

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Please note all artist-in-residence biographies are accurate at the time of their residency. For up-to-date bios please visit the artist’s website.