Dr Kavita Singh was awarded a Small Study and Research Study Grant (India) 1993-94, when Senior Research Fellow, Punjab University, Chandigarh, for the study of Bengal pata paintings.
A professor of art history, Dr Singh served as the dean at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University. She obtained her BA at Lady Shri Ram College, her MFA in 1987 from MSU Baroda, and her PhD in 1996 from Punjab University.
Dr Singh was appointed to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2001, where she was a co-founder of the internationally recognized School of Art and Aesthetics and served there as a professor till her death. Her research interests covered the history of Indian painting, particularly the Mughal and Rajpur schools and the history and politics of museums, with a special focus on India.
Before joining JNU, Singh taught at the College of Art, Delhi and the National Institute of Technology, Delhi. She was also a research editor for Marg Publications and a visiting guest curator at the San Diego Museum of Art, during which time she co-curated the exhibition Power and Desire: South Asian Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art, Edwin Binney 3rd Collection.
In 2007, Singh led a curatorial team for the second exhibition of the newly opened Devi Art Foundation. The exhibition was titled Where in the World. An abridged version of Singh’s introduction to the catalogue appeared online.[6] From 2009–2012 she was a partner at the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florenz of the Max Planck Society with Professor Dr. Gerhard Wolf and Hannah Baader for a project called The Temple and the Museum: Sites for Art in India.
Kavita Singh was elected as an International Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, one of 37 foreign inductees that year, and the only one from India in the field of Arts and Humanities.
In 2018, she was awarded the Infosys Prize in Humanities for her work in the field of art history and visual culture. She received numerous fellowships and scholarships throughout her career, including from the Getty Research Institute, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williams College, and the Asia Society New York as well as from the NTICVA.
Kavita Singh died of cancer on 30 July 2023, at the age of 58.