INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Nandita Baxi Sheth has been awarded the 2025 IDSVA Ted Coons Dissertation Prize for the dissertation: Being Melliferous: Towards Multispecies Aesthetics, directed by Dr. Dejan Lukic. The award was conferred at the IDSVA Commencement ceremony in New York City at the Morgan Library Auditorium on April 27, 2025.
Nandita Baxi Sheth was born in 1965 in Chennai (Madras), India and grew up in the Midwest of the United States. Having also lived in Beijing, PRC, and Manila, the Philippines, she currently calls Cincinnati, Ohio, home. Her academic background includes a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University (Houston, Texas) with majors in Architectural Studies, Art History, and English. She has a Master of Community Planning and Master of Visual Arts Education from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati (UC).
Dr. Sheth has worked as an architect, city planner, art educator, researcher, and is a practicing artist. She has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses at UC in the School of Art. She co-taught the award-winning Honors course “Sticky Innovation,” leading to student participation in the International Biodesign Summit. She is a member of The Plant Contingent, a collective of artist-philosophers who explore plant ontology and the notion of becoming-with-plants. Additionally, she is one of the founders of UC’s Strange Tools Lab which explores arts-based research tools in response to uncertain futures.
Dr. Sheth’s dissertation engages human-bee relations, which are transhistorical and transcultural, spanning from prehistory to contemporary times, articulating relations across these planetary registers through a variety of aesthetic forms. She traces entangled transformations occurring across the airy rhizome of pollination to develop the overarching concept of “being melliferous.” This biological term for mutual reciprocities across plants and pollinators is adapted into an aesthetic-philosophic proposal for rethinking hegemonic and anthropocentric paradigms of “nature” through post-humanist and multispecies frameworks. Through poetic and scientific articulations, along with material and biological explorations of bees and pollen, Dr. Sheth demonstrates the ways in which interspecies encounters and material entanglements are relevant for future understandings of planetary aesthetics.
The Ted Coons Dissertation Prize is awarded to one IDSVA graduate each year. The Prize was established in 2015 to acknowledge outstanding IDSVA dissertations that distinguish themselves for their original philosophical approach, scholarly quality, and contribution to new knowledge. It was made possible thanks to a generous donation by Dr. Ted Coons, Professor Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Cognition & Perception at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. Professor Ted Coons is a pioneer in the field of neuroscience and a major contributor to early studies in neuroaesthetics.