Priyanka Mathew is the former senior international specialist and lead auctioneer for the South Asian department at Sotheby’s. Her experience spans a decade and a half in the international auction and gallery worlds and prior to that, in finance.

At Sotheby’s, she was responsible for market-changing auction records like Amrita Shergil’s Self Portrait that sold for $2.9m which set a world record price for a female South Asian modern painter. She has worked with the most prominent collections spread over the globe and has brought to market key paintings such as the Blue Tyeb from the Glenberra Museum of Art in Japan and Gaitonde’s paintings No. 1 and No. 3. Mathew has also worked on the auctions of critical and market defining collections such as the Amaya Collection.

After graduating from the University of Virginia, Mathew entered the finance field as an analyst at Lehman Brothers and then at Goldman Sachs. After five years in the investment banking field, she left to join the Indian art world as the director of Aicon Gallery, a leading gallery showcasing modern South Asian Art. Under her tenure, Aicon became the largest the gallery for South Asian Art globally, operating in New York, Palo Alto, and London. Mathew joined Sotheby’s in 2010 and in 2012 was initiated as their first South Asian auctioneer in their 272-year-old history.

She now gathers all this experience to bring to Sunderlande, an art agency that offers the highest caliber modern South Asian art and where she is the Principal Partner, to evaluate and promote the best of South Asian Modern Art with an eye on quality and store of future value.