Ravina Aggarwal

Ravina Aggarwal is director of the Columbia Global Center | South Asia, located in Mumbai, India. Prior to joining Columbia, she was a Program Officer at the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi office from 2007-2015, where she was responsible for strategic planning and grant-making for programs on development, social justice and public policy, with a focus on the fields of education, media and technology, and arts and culture. Her work in the philanthropy sector followed a long career as a sociocultural anthropologist. After receiving her doctoral degree from Indiana University in 1994, she joined the Department of Anthropology at Smith College, where she became a tenured faculty member and also served in the Women’s Studies Program. Her research was based on extensive fieldwork in the Himalayan region of Ladakh in South Asia and her areas of study and teaching included political anthropology, peace-building, cultural studies, gender, and development.
Dr. Aggarwal is the author of several publications including Beyond Lines of Control: Performing the Border in Ladakh, India (Duke University Press, 2004). She is co-founder of the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism and a founding trustee of Ladakh Arts and Media Organization, a non-profit society.