Manjari Sihare-Sutin (VAA ’12), VAA Distinguished Alumni of 2026

Written by Melissa Rachleff Burtt, Faculty, Visual Arts Administration

On April 17, 2026, Manjari Sihare-Sutin (Visual Arts Administration ’12) visited the Barney Building at NYU to present insights gained from her distinguished art career spanning two decades. Growing up in a family deeply rooted in Delhi’s arts and cultural institutions, Manjari thought she would be an artist. However, after spending a brief period at art school, Manjari realized it wasn’t the right path for her. She decided to switch to art history and enrolled at the renowned National Museum Institute of the History of Art, Conservation and Museology in New Delhi. There Manjari met curators and conservators, and significantly, arts administrators—the people who kept the exhibitions and programs flowing. Her growing curiosity about arts leadership and administration motivated Manjari expand her horizons through graduate study abroad to gain perspective and new skills. 

“I was working top of the ecosystem, working with the top artists, top curators, top gallery when I decided to hit the reset button,” Manjari recalled about her decision to go to graduate school. Her curiosity about arts leadership and administration led her to NYU’s Visual Arts Administration program in 2010. She applied for a fellowship grant sponsored by the Indian government, and though she was selected as one of the finalists, the fellowship went to someone else. “Not getting that scholarship,” Manjari told students and visitors on April 17, “was devastating, truly a shock to the system especially when the signals were those of support.” However, an encouraging call from a mentor to not give up led to a different opportunity: a scholarship from NYU VAA alumni Nellie Gipson. Not getting the government scholarship, it turned out, “was the best thing to happen to me,” Manjari reflected. “It taught me there could be other avenues, and there was someone more deserving than me. Like a Bollywood movie, it always works out in the end.”

That open attitude permeated Manjari’s approach to her studies and career. Manjari took on a series of part-time jobs, ranging from staffing the NYU Bookstore to working with specialists in art from India at Saffronart to being a studio manager for the artist Rina Banerjee. She learned quickly that in New York’s fast-paced art world, “none of my experience mattered, I had to start from scratch.” Sending emails and letters to people in New York recommended by her colleagues in India led Manjari to meet Jane DeBevoise, the head of the Asia Art Archive in America. DeBevoise introduced Manjari to one of the chairmen of Asian Art at Sotheby’s. Through VAA’s alumni network, Manjari met Rachel Perera Weingeist of the Tibetan art-focused Rubin Family Foundation and David Strauss, then-head of communications at the Queens Museum, which has long focused on the Indian diaspora in New York City. “I did a series of informational interviews with different people around the kind of work I could do. I was determined to make my experience in India work for me; the art I studied was not part of the mainstream conversation, but it still mattered,” Manjari asserted. Her commitment to India’s cultural history led Manjari to volunteer at Asian and Indian art conferences and coordinate exhibitions for galleries and museums, deploying her expertise, finding avenues where she could make meaningful contributions. The determination Manjari brought to interning, volunteering, and informational interviews made her known to the broader Asian art community in New York City. When a curatorial position opened at the Queens Museum in 2012, curator Hitomi Iwasaki called Manjari encouraging her to apply—which she did and was hired soon thereafter. Manjari arrived at an auspicious time in the Museum’s history, under the leadership of Tom Finkelpearl. “It was an opportunity to work with dynamic, intelligent curators,” Manjari reflected, “and Tom himself had been a curator. He was part of P.S. 1 in the 1970s, and part of the Percent for Art program in New York City. To see him, to watch him, not just being a curator or director, but as an artist too, and an administrator—all these experiences rolled into one—was formative.” The Queens Museum championed New York City’s multicultural communities. The art program focused on contemporary art, a chance to bring visibility to artwork that would not be shown elsewhere.

Manjari was put in charge of coordinating exhibitions, overseeing processes from fundraising to communication strategy to collaborating with guest curators. During her tenure she oversaw projects that explored the legacy of the museum’s site—the former New York Pavilion during the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. She tracked down versions of Andy Warhol’s 1964 series FBI’s Most Wanted Men. The originals were painted over by Warhol due to concern expressed by the then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. It was the first time since 1964 that the paintings were brought together. 

The Museum’s facility is significant for another reason. In 1947 it was the venue for the second session of the General Assembly of the United Nations because its permanent home had not been completed. This history was mined in Pedro Reyes’s The People’s United Nations (pUN). In 2015, Manjari’s last year at the Queens Museum, she coordinated an impressive series of Asian art shows as collaborating curator: two major survey exhibitions, After Midnight: Indian Moderns and Contemporary Indian Art and Anonymous: Contemporary Tibetan Art, and a solo exhibition of New York City-based artist Zhang Hongtu's painting series investigating Mao Zedong’s iconic portrait.

Manjari might have continued at the Queens Museum for years, but in 2015 Sotheby’s Indian and South Asian Art department reached out to her about a position for which they hoped she would apply. Sotheby’s represented a different challenge for Manjari, and when she was offered the job, Manjari took the leap that July. “For the first month I just got accustomed to Sotheby’s systems—their software, cataloging methods,” she recalled, “dwelling art historically into each work that was consigned to auction.” Getting ready for the September sale—and the Indian and South Asian Art department has two, March and September—“there was a switch for me, it took me back to art history, which was my beginning.” She had a second realization after the sale, “the art disappears,” unlike in museum exhibitions where work remains on view for months and there are opportunities to interact, spend time with the works gathered. Sotheby’s pace was also different. “In museums we work two to three years on an exhibition,” but in the auction realm, “we have to put together an auction in less than six months.” But there is a lot of preplanning and explorative research involved. Today, Manjari’s life is lived across continents: in New York, London, and throughout India where she meets with clients, collectors, and experts. “We don’t always get to choose what we want,” Manjari observed about the auction process. Always attentive to history, Manjari builds knowledge and context for all that will be sold. For a decade Manjari has steadily increased value for modern Indian and South Asian artists including K.C.S. Paniker, Amarnath Sehgal, Francis Newton Souza, Maqbool Fida Husain and Sayed Halder Raza. Contemporary artists Manjari secured for auction include Vivan Sundaram and Zarina. 

The Indian and South Asian art market is expanding under Manjari’s leadership. Today she is Sotheby’s Co-Worldwide Head, overseeing 96 percent of the lots sold between 2023 and 2026, with 86 percent of those sales exceeding the high estimates. This bodes well for the market and for increasing interest in art from the region. Ever diplomatic, Manjari was quick to share credit; Sotheby’s has a long history with its collectors from which she builds, but there are always new pathways. “It starts a journey,” Manjari shared about the process of organizing sales, “an opportunity to say we haven’t featured this artist before. Where do they sit in Indian art history? If we have only this small work amidst a sea of other work, it could disappear. How do we bring visibility?” Her answer is context, and from research she generates ideas about other artists, other artworks that round out the story each sale offers. “That’s the joy of putting the sales together,” Manjari explained, “a vision around those who deserve more recognition.”