Sarita Sundar is a designer and design historian based in India. At Hanno, her heritage interpretation and design consultancy (www.hanno.in), she combines 35 years of working with brand design and strategy with her academic training in museum studies. Through the years, her work has looked critically at how culture engages with the visual, ranging from research into Indian vernacular typography to studies of intangible culture in performance practices. She has a particular interest in unearthing alternate views of modernity in design practices and research. Her recent publication: ‘From the Frugal to the Ornate: Stories of the Seat in India’, culturally and temporally, maps the journey of a ubiquitous and everyday object, while also challenging existing norms of design historiography. During a recent Fulbright Teaching and Research Fellowship she investigated the resistances to modernism in Indian and American design histories. She has conducted lectures at academic and cultural institutions across India and abroad. Sarita has served as a member of the NID Senate, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and is an Academic Advisor to The DJ Academy of Design, Coimbatore.

Sarita has a Post-Graduation in Visual Communications from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad (1990), and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK (2016). She ran an award winning multi-disciplinary design company, Trapeze for a decade before moving her focus to a research oriented consultancy at Hanno. She received The Professor Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Academic Prize for 2016 from the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, and an Arts Research Grant from the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) to study Poothan Thira, a ritual performance from Kerala (2015-2017). Sarita continues her fascination for seats through a project that studies the Planter’s Chair in collaboration with Dr. Rachel Lee of TUV Delft.