Biographical Sketch
Yael Rice (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) specializes in the art and architecture of South Asia and Greater Iran, with a particular focus on manuscripts and other portable arts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Between 2009-12, she held the position of Assistant Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in that capacity curated exhibitions of court portraits from South Asia, ragamala paintings, and works by Rabindranath Tagore and other Bengali artists of the early twentieth century. Most recently, she co-curated Painting the Persianate World: Portable Images on Paper, Cloth, and Clay with Yao Wu, the Jane Chase Carroll Curator of Asian Art at the Smith College Museum of Art.
Among her recent publications, Rice is the author of The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court (University of Washington Press, 2023), which was a recipient of a Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant. With Dipti Khera, she also co-edited Readings on Painting: From 75 Years of Marg (Marg, 2024). The latter publication brings together important articles on Indian painting published by Marg, an art book and magazine publisher founded in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1946.
Rice is interested in the potential that computational methods and digital tools hold for the study of art history. Her publications in this vein include “Workshop as Network: A Case Study from Mughal South Asia,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 3 (2017): 50–65; “Art History Beyond Objects,” Art Journal Open, published January 26, 2023, the final installation of the three-part series “Teaching for a Future-Oriented Art History,” conceived with Nancy Um and Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi; and a planned special issue on "The Urgency of the Digital," which Rice is guest editing for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.