Join Deepali Dewan, Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture, Royal Ontario Museum, and Sophie Hackett, AGO Curator, Photography, in conversation. Museums and cultural institutions around the world are facing unique opportunities and challenges. They are reimagining and reinventing. This series of conversations invites professionals from around the world who are thinking about art and audiences, and learning in different ways.

Deepali Dewan is the Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto and is affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies. She is part of the new editorial team, along with Thy Phu and Yi Gu, for Trans Asian Photography Review, an open-access online peer-review journal for the interdisciplinary exploration of photography and Asia. She has curated exhibitions on 19th-century photographer Raja Deen Dayal, Indian painted photographs, and family photography with related publications. Her research spans issues of colonial, modern and contemporary visual culture of South Asia and its Diaspora, including topics such as knowledge production, art education, decorative arts and historiography.

Sophie Hackett has been a member of the AGO’s department of photography since 2006. During her tenure she has curated many exhibitions and collection installations, written and contributed to a number of publications, participated on international juries and maintained an active academic profile. She is currently an adjunct faculty member in Ryerson University’s Master’s degree program in Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management, and was a 2017 Fellow with the Center for Curatorial Leadership. Hackett’s areas of specialty include vernacular photographs; photography in relation to queerness; and photography in Canada from the1960s to the 1990s.

Hackett’s curatorial projects include Barbara Kruger: Untitled (It) (2010); Max Dean: Album, A Public Project (2012); What It Means To be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility and Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography (2014); Introducing Suzy Lake (2014); Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s (2016); Anthropocene (2018) and Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971 (2020).