Dr Bharti Parmar is a UK artist and academic of Indian descent with a practice of 30 years whose focus is upon vernacular crafts and systems. She makes prints, archival installations, sculpture and embroidery. Her current research interests are botany, cotton and Indian independence. She recently exhibited in the groundbreaking exhibition ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768-now’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, which explored questions of power, representation and history. Parmar studied at the Royal College of Art in London and has a doctorate in Fine Art for the examination of the poetics of Victorian material culture. Her work is represented in numerous institutional collections such as the Pitt Rivers Museum, The Whitworth Gallery and the Government Art Collection.

She has supported numerous institutions as a trustee including Midlands Arts Centre Birmingham, Meadow Arts, Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art and Arts&Heritage. She was co-editor of Colour, Vol. 4 of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles, and currently serves on Arts Council England’s Museums Designation Panel.

In 2025, Parmar was appointed Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, where she is developing Paper/Cotton/Plant, a new body of work exploring ethnobotany through artistic practice. In May 2026, she undertook a Maker-Creator Fellowship at Winterthur Museum & Library in Delaware, USA, researching historical material culture relating to old English herbals.

Website: www.bhartiparmar.com