A curator and publisher at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi, Rahaab Allana has curated exhibitions on South Asian photography and edited and written for several publications.

Allana received his undergraduate education at the St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi, and his MA in Art History from the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), London. While working as an assistant at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi, he also began working on the archive accumulated by his grandfather, Ebrahim Alkazi. Over five years, Allana collected material from the archive’s offices in New York and London, and established its Delhi office. In 2006, he took over as the curator of the archives at the Alkazi Foundation. He has made significant additions of his own to the archive, most notably incorporating material from cinema. Filmi Jagat, a found scrapbook sheds light on the earliest years of Indian cinema, between the 1930s–40s; information on those years is nearly non-existent given that only five per cent of the period’s cinematic output survives today.

He is the author of Inherited Spaces (2005), a volume on the photographs of World Heritage Sites taken by Raghu Rai. As a curator he has worked with institutions and organisations such as the Serendipity Arts Festival, The Brunei Gallery (London), Rencontres d’Arles and Jimei x Arles (France), Rubin Museum (New York), Helmut Newton Foundation (Germany), Folkwang Museum (Germany), National Museum (India), National Gallery of Modern Art (India), and Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (India), among others. His curatorial work broadly reflects on South Asia as a region and is invested in tracing trans-national histories of photography. His notable exhibitions include Vijaynagara: Splendour in Ruins, 2009 and Drawn from Light: Early Photography and the Indian Sub-continent, 2014.

He is the founding editor of PIX Quarterly, a magazine that focuses on South Asian lens based practices. He has also edited volumes for Aperture Magazine, Marg and Tulika Books. In addition to his roles at the Alkazi Foundation, he is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society London and Honorary Research Associate at University College, London. He serves on the Advisory Committees and juries of various cultural institutions and bodies, including the India-Europe Foundation for New Dialogue, Pictet Award and the Gabriele Basilico Prize in Architecture and Landscape Photography.

At the time of writing, Allana lives and works in New Delhi.