MALLICA KUMBERA LANDRUS
Professor and Keeper of Eastern Art, Curator of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art
Governing Body Fellow at St Cross College
Contact
Email: mallica.kumberalandrus@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0002-2666-8549
University of Oxford webpages
South Asian Studies - Oxford School of Global and Area Studies
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
Biography
Mallica Kumbera Landrus is Keeper of the Eastern Art Department in the Ashmolean Museum, where the collections include ceramics, textiles, sculpture, metalwork, paintings, prints and other decorative arts, that span more than 5,000 years of cultural and artistic development, from the Islamic Middle East, China, Korea, Japan, South and Southeast Asia. Her curatorial responsibilities are mainly in the area of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian art. She is a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.
Kumbera Landrus is an art historian and curator working on the history of art and architecture in the Indian subcontinent. Her courses and publications have focused on early modern, colonial and contemporary topics, while her curatorial projects include M F Hussain's Early Masterpieces, 1950s-70s (Brown University, 2010); Tradition, Trauma, Transformation: representation of women by Chitra Ganesh, Nalini Malani and Nilima Sheikh (Brown University, 2011); Bengal and Modernity: Early 20th century art in India (Ashmolean, 2015); Yoshida Hiroshi: A Japanese artist in India (Ashmolean, 2015); Old Traditions New Visions: Art in India and Pakistan after 1947 (Ashmolean, 2018); Ali Kazim: Suspended in Time (Ashmolean, 2022); Manisha Gera Baswani: Postcards from Home - 1947 and the Partition of India (Ashmolean, 2022/23); Soma Surovi Jannat: Climate Culture Care (Ashmolean, forthcoming 2026); Colonial Views of India: Photographs by Eugene Clutterbuck Impey (Ashmolean, forthcoming 2026).
Kumbera Landrus is on the editorial board for publication in Studies in Asian Art and Culture at the University of Bonn, and she was a Trustee of the Charles Wallace India Trust (2019-2022). Before Oxford, she was a senior lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She has also held teaching, research, curatorial and/or management posts at institutes such as Princeton University, Brown University and the Jaipur City Palace Museum. In the late 1990s, Kumbera Landrus held an internship at the Smithsonian (Freer and Sackler) and was a member of the Torre de Palma excavation in Portugal, one of the largest Roman villas in Iberia. She received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
