Vidya Dehejia

Vidya Dehejia was educated at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, where she earned First Class Honors in ancient Indian culture in 1961. In 1963, at Newnham College, Cambridge, she studied for the Tripos in Archaeology & Anthropology, and again received Honors, as well as the Hannah Floretta Cohen Award and the Sir Thomas Young Medal for “Outstanding distinction in the field of Oriental Studies.” She completed her Ph.D. at Cambridge in 1968 with a doctoral dissertation titled “Early Buddhist Caves of Western India.”

From 1968 to 1972, Dr. Dehejia was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Sydney and from 1970 to 1972, a lecturer in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Hong Kong. From 1973 to 1979, Dr. Dehejia taught courses on the ancient architecture of India at the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture and was a fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research, New Delhi, as well as a Fellow in the Homi Bhabha Program, New Delhi.

In 1984, she began her tenure as Associate Professor of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University. In 1994, she joined the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (now the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), as chief curator and deputy director, and served as Acting Director in 2001/2002. Dr. Dehejia returned to teaching at Columbia in 2002, assuming an endowed chair named in honor of Barnard College Sanskritist Barbara Stoler Miller, in the Department of Art History & Archaeology. She was named director of the University's South Asian Institute in 2003. Until her retirement in 2021, Dr. Dehejia trained two generations of scholars who have pursued careers as academics, curators, researchers, and writers.

Dr. Dehejia has published twenty-seven books to date. Her first book, Early Buddhist Rock Temples, was published by Thames and Hudson in 1972, and her most recent book, The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855-1280, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She has published numerous articles and curated several exhibitions, including at the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York), the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Washington, D.C.), and the Royal Academy of the Arts (London). She has presented many public lectures, including the prestigious 65th A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, a lecture series that aims “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” She is currently working on an exhibition titled “In the Realms of Friendship” for the new Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, as well as on a book on the challenging 7th– 8th century site of Mamallapuram in south India

In addition to the Freer Medal, which “honors persons, who over the course of a career, have contributed in a substantial way to the understanding of the arts of Asia,” and the Padma Bhushan, Dr. Dehejia’s work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. In 2023, the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University announced the establishment of the Vidya Dehejia Professorship of South Asian Art, a position endowed by philanthropists Shanthi Kandiah and Brahmal Vasudevan.

Dr. Dehejia and Jay Dehejia were together for sixty years, having met at Cambridge in 1961. They have two sons and four grandchildren.

• The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855-1280 (Princeton University Press, 2021)
• India: A Story Through 100 Objects (Lustre Press/Roli Books, 2021)
• The Unfinished: Stone Sarvers at Work on the Indian Subcontinent, with Peter Rockwell (Lustre Press/Roli Books, 2016)
• The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries between Sacred and Profane in India's Art (Columbia University Press, 2009)
• Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj (Mapin Publishing in association with Timeless Books, 2008)
• Chola: Sacred Bronzes of Southern India (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2006)
• The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India (American Federation of Arts; University of Washington Press, 2002)
• India Through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911 (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian in association with Mapin Publishing, 2000)
• Devi The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian in association with Mapin Publishing, 1999)
• Indian Art (Phaidon, 1997)
• Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India (Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1997)
• The Legend of Rama: Artistic Visions (Marg Publications, 1994)
• Art of the Imperial Cholas (Columbia University Press, 1990)
• Āṇṭāḷ and Her Path of Love: Poems of a Woman Saint from South India (State University of New York Press, 1990)
• Impossible Picturesqueness: Edward Lear's Indian Watercolours, 1873-1875 (Columbia University Press, 1989)
• Slaves of the Lord: The Path of the Tamil Saints (Munshiram Manoharlal, 1988)
• Yoginī, Cult and Temples: A Tantric Tradition (National Museum, New Delhi, 1986)
• Early Stone Temples of Orissa (Carolina Academic Press, 1979)
• Early Buddhist Rock Temples: A Chronological Study (Thames & Hudson, 1972)