Sowparnika Balaswaminathan is an Assistant Professor in Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. She received a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, and was a Peter Buck postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC.

Her work examines the politics of heritage, the ethics and aesthetics of artisanal labor, and religious art traditions in India. Her ethnographic project, currently being written as a manuscript, examines the formulation of artisanal personhood in contemporary India at the nexus of politicized and neoliberalized Hindu art, and evolving politics of caste, specifically amongst the Tamil Vishwakarma community in Swamimalai, Tamilnadu. Her postdoctoral project examines the affective labor of museum collecting during the Cold war era, and the limits of ethnonational representation in museum exhibits through the Asian ethnographic collections at the Smithsonian NMNH.