Indie A. Choudhury

Indie A. Choudhury is a specialist in the art, literary, and sonic Anglophone cultures of the Black Atlantic, particularly histories and theories of resistance, time and metaphysics, poetics-poethics, abstraction, and subjectivity. While her work is based in the modern and contemporary period, it encompasses the history, legacies, and afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade and other diasporic ruptures of migration and exile. Her research and teaching interests have an interdisciplinary remit, exploring the intersections between art history, literature, postcolonial studies, critical theory, and Black studies.

Before joining the Courtauld in 2022, she was a recipient of a pre-doctoral Research Fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art and a CCSRE Fellow at Stanford University. Her doctoral work from Stanford is a monograph on Frank Bowling that examines his oeuvre through his white series, a body of work that spans over eight decades of his practice and is the first full-length scholarly study of Bowling’s white paintings.
She received her BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Cultural Management from the University of London. She has extensive museum and gallery experience in curatorial, research, and education roles in the UK museum and gallery sector including the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), the National Maritime Museum, and Tate.

Notable exhibitions and programmes include projects with John Akomfrah, Faisal Abdu’Allah, Jazzy B, and The Sea is History for the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807-2007). She has collaborated with the experimental artist research group Dubmorphology and the late sound system pioneer Jah Shaka. Indie was a Teaching Fellow for the Arts Council England’s Inspire Curators Programme for Black and minority ethnic curators. She was a participant in the Black Arts Movement Modality at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has partnered with the Yale School of Architecture, Royal Society of the Arts, and the British Museum.
Recent talks and lectures include the Black Industrial Noise series at Iklectik, UCL, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Warburg Institute. Recent projects includes adviser for the Barbican’s Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain1945-1965 exhibition in 2022 and forthcoming publications on Hew Locke, Clementine Hunter and Toni Morrison, and in Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin published by Duke University Press in 2024, a culmination of a NEH-funded project with the University of Tennessee.

In her research and teaching practice, Indie has a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, and widening participation. While at Stanford, she was a mentor in the Dean’s Office of First Generation & Low Income (FLI) Program and initiated a Social Justice Forum at the Cantor Arts Center to encourage students to art history and tackle barriers to careers in the arts. Similarly, at Cambridge, she was a GEEMA ambassador to encourage and support ethnic minority applications. Indie was Senior Tutor (2022-23) at the Courtauld.
Indie’s research has been supported by Yale University, Stanford Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has been the recipient of several awards including from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the African and African American Studies Program at Stanford University, the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford in Modern British History and Culture, and the University of Cambridge.