Shailka Mishra received the NTICVA UK Visiting Fellowship (2012–13) while a PhD student at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, to study collections of Indian painting, particularly material from the Amber–Jaipur region, in UK museums. The fellowship supported the research phase of her doctoral work and enabled close engagement with museum collections, sale catalogues, and scholarly networks in the UK.
She completed her PhD in 2016 with a thesis titled Suratkhana at Amber-Jaipur in the 18th Century: Paintings, Patronage, Practices, which examined workshop organisation, patronage, and the production of paintings and maps at the Jaipur court. Her research was also supported by the Indian Council of Historical Research and Jnana-Pravaha (Varanasi). She was also a Fellow at The City Palace Museum, Jaipur in 2011-12, where she studied their maps and paintings. Following her doctorate, she held research and curatorial positions at the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, Jodhpur; Freer and Sackler Galleries (Smithsonian Institution), Washington DC; and the Forum Transregionale/Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin.
She later worked with the City Palace Museum, Udaipur, where she served as Consultant Curator and led major research-driven exhibitions, including Portraits, Kings, Landscape: The Practice of Painting at Udaipur and Picturing Place: Painted and Printed Maps at the Udaipur Court, the latter supported by a Getty Foundation Paper Project grant.
Since 2021, she has been Director of the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, Hyderabad, where she leads the museum’s research and collections-based work, facilitates scholarly access, and oversees international collaborations.
Her publications include contributions to Peacock in the Desert: The Royal Arts of Jodhpur, India (2018), Dakhan 2018: Recent Studies in Indian Painting (2020), and A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (2022). More recently, she compiled the memoir A Life Around Art: Jagdish Mittal at 100 (2025), published to mark the birth centenary of the Padma Shri awardee, and authored the catalogue Picturing Place: Painted and Printed Maps at the Udaipur Court (Mapin, 2025).