Sheena Sippy is a Bombay-based portrait and food photographer, designer, and creative consultant. Her love of images comes from her family, which has been making cinema in Bollywood for three generations. She admits to being completely addicted to creating and consuming coffee table books. Sheena’s first book on Bollywood, Lights Camera Masala (India Book House), won the World Gold Award for Book Design at the New York Festivals in July 2007. She was the visual consultant and curator for Bollywood Posters (India Book House, 2008). Her previous work, Around the World in 80 Plates (India Book House, 2006) won her the World Gourmand Award for best food photography. Sheena also designed and produced the coffee table books for the first two seasons of the Indian Premier League T20 (BCCI) with her partner Siddharth Gogel. She is currently shooting around the world for her next book project, slated to release in Fall 2012.
Over the last decade, Sheena has photographed personalities as varied as Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Imran Khan, Lord Wedgewood, Matthew Modine, Naomi Campbell and Zakir Husain. These portraits have coloured the pages of fashion, food & lifestyle features published in magazines such as British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, The London Independent Review, Time, Cosmopolitan, Verve, Lonely Planet and The Taj Magazine.
In 2008, she spent six weeks traveling the globe and documenting some of Bollywood’s most celebrated as the official photographer during The Unforgettable World Tour. More recently she has gone back to photographing her favourite subjects, the ones with more attitude than all the celebrities and stars put together - kids!
Sheena also spends much of her professional time chasing tiramisus and bellinis in Venice, searching for the coolest creperies in Paris, and hunting out truffle farmers in Western Australia. These are but a few of her intrepid gourmet journeys. As a food photographer, she has been invited by the French and Australian Governments to showcase their finest. The deGustibus group in India (Indigo, Indigo Deli, Tote & Moveable Feast) have been her clients since the inception of their first restaurant twelve years ago. Her latest clients from the hospitality industry are Hilton Irufushi in the Maldives, and The Promenade and Le Dupleix in Pondicherry.
Sheena had her first solo exhibition, Under the Influence of Marilyn and Other Portraits of Childhood, at the Chemould Art Gallery in Bombay in September 2002. In March 2003 she had a mixed media exhibition, Mera Star, displaying portraits of Indian film stars. For this she collaborated with street children to raise funds for an NGO, Aangan Trust. In January 2006 she was part of Back to the Future, a large group show along with 50 artists celebrating 16 years of Gallery Espace in Delhi. February 2009 saw her next solo show, Cine Indo Chine, in collaboration with Matthieu Foss Gallery and Art Musings Gallery in Bombay. This show traveled to Delhi’s Habitat Centre in February 2010.
She has also been part of many other group exhibitions such as AIPA, Exhibit A and Freedom of Expression. In 1997, she was part of a photographic exhibition on women in India, In Black and White, an ambitious project that traveled India and the world and covered the works of over 40 Indian and international photographers including Sebastian Salgado, Max Vadukul, Michael Ackerman and Zana Briski.
Sheena received her BA in Liberal Arts from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She schooled at Montville High School, NJ and the Cathedral & John Connon School, Bombay.