An art historian specialising in the arts of South Asia with a focus on Buddhist art, Susan L Huntington is distinguished university professor emeritus at the Ohio State University in Columbus, USA. 

A major body of Huntington’s research is dedicated to the art of the Pala dynasty of early medieval Bengal, which combined influences from South and Southeast Asia. Some of her research was published in The Pala-Sena Schools of Sculpture (1984). Her next major publication, The Art of Ancient India (1985), was written with contributions from her partner and fellow historian John C Huntington and traced a chronological history of early Indian art. The book collated protohistoric and prehistoric visual and material culture with developments in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain contexts through the ancient and early medieval period.

The archive of photographic documentation carried out by the Huntingtons has been institutionalised as the John C and Susan L Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art. The archive comprises around 300,000 original photographs of in situ works of art in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. It includes artefacts and objects, both contemporary and historical, dating as far back as 2500 BCE, from these countries that are housed in museums across the world. It serves as a resource for researchers and scholars, and invites contributions as well. 

Susan Huntington’s work has been supported by awards and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Award programme, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution. She has been awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award and a distinguished university professorship by the Ohio State University. She has held appointments as a visiting professor at the Balliol College at Oxford University and Northwestern University, Illinois. She serves as a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and is on the board of various national and international committees such as the American Committee for South Asian Art, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Association for Asian Studies and the College Art Association of America. 

At the time of writing, Huntington lives and works in Columbus, Ohio, where in addition to teaching and advising as the Professor Emeritus, she is currently the Director of the Huntington Archive.