Faculty Director
Sugata Ray

Sugata Ray is associate professor of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies. Ray’s recent books include Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019; awarded the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion and the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (coedited; 2020). He is currently writing a book on Anthropocene extinction in the early modern period.


Chair
Dipti Mathur

Dipti Mathur is a collector of modern and contemporary South Asian art. Her ongoing interests lie in working with institutions in the US to promote a broader cross-cultural understanding and study of contemporary Indian art. She has served on the Board of Trustees and Collection Committees of several museums, and Chairs the South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley, and the Arts Council of the South Asia Institute at Harvard University. She is a founding member of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium, San Francisco.


Asha Jadeja Motwani

As one of Silicon Valley's most highly respected venture capitalists, Asha Jadeja Motwani has invested in over a 100 well known technology startups in the Valley such as Paypal, Mimosa, AppDynamics, Meraki and Pinterest. Asha's late husband Professor Rajeev Motwani was the co-author of Google algorithms before it was a company. As founding stakeholders in the company he and Asha played a critical role in placing the first 100 or so employees in Google the startup. The company now has over 70,000 employees. Asha continues to work closely with Google Ventures and Google Foundation on various joint investments. Currently Asha invests as an angel mostly in Bay Area technology startups and a few in South Asia. As an active philanthropist, Asha helped create MakerFaire Africa in 2009 and later launched MakerFests in India and Pakistan with the objective of showcasing alternative means of learning and earning through local problem solving. Makerfests create strong local roots, and enrich the existing tech ecosystem by highlighting local problem solving as a powerful mechanism for community building. Asha set up India's most advanced Fablab at Cept University (her Alma mater), and placed key engineers and architects from MIT and CEPT in it, to integrate Fablab into course curriculum.


Kaushie Adiseshan and Anand Rajaraman

Anand Rajaraman is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and an academic based in Silicon Valley. Anand is a Founding Partner at Rocketship.vc, a global venture capital firm that has backed many high-growth startups all over the world. Prior to starting Rocketship, he was Senior Vice President at Walmart Global eCommerce, where he co-headed @WalmartLabs, focused at the intersection of social, mobile, and commerce. Anand was also a Founding Partner of Cambrian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and has backed iconic Silicon Valley companies including Facebook and Lyft.

In 1996, Anand co-founded Junglee, an e-commerce pioneer that was acquired by Amazon. He helped launch the transformation of Amazon.com from a retailer into a retail platform, enabling third-party retailers to sell on Amazon.com's website. He has also been active in academia, where his research publications have won many prestigious awards. His textbook “Mining of Massive Datasets,” co-authored with Jeff Ullman and Jure Leskovec of Stanford University, has over a million downloads and has been translated into several languages.


Minal Vazirani

Minal Vazirani founded Saffronart in 2000, and has been instrumental in growing its operations from startup to its current position. In addition, Vazirani has curated, planned and organized exhibitions of Indian art in India and internationally. She is a regular panelist and guest speaker at Indian contemporary art events as an industry expert, and has served several industry organizations. She has been on the board of advisors to the Friends of Sir JJ School of Art Trust and Time Out magazine India, and has co-chaired the FICCI committee on Arts and Business. Minal has been featured in Art + Auction magazine’s global power issue, and been a fellow at the Aspen Institute’s India leadership program. In 2005, Vazirani led a review of Saffronart’s business when the Harvard Business School published a case study on the company. It continues to be studied by MBA students across business schools.


Nita Goyal 

Dr. Nita Goyal works at Google Research applying AI to climate solutions. Over the past decade, she has worked at Google across research and products in natural language, search and maps. Previously she has been a serial entrepreneur and tech executive with experience in silicon valley and India. She was co-founder and VP at Tavant Technologies for 8 years building pricing solutions for large manufacturers and lenders in the US. She was also SVP Products at NGPay, a pioneer in mobile commerce in India. She started her career as a research engineer at HP labs after getting a PhD in CS (AI) from Stanford University and a BTech (CS) from IIT Kanpur. She is the first woman CS graduate across all IITs.