Sita Venkateswar is Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology programme at Massey University, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She is also Associate Director of the Massey chapter of the New Zealand India Research Institute (NZIRI). She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University in 1997. Her ethnography Development and Ethnocide: Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands (2004) is based on her PhD fieldwork in the Andaman Islands from 1989 to 1992 funded by the National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant. Her co-edited book, The Politics of Indigeneity: Dialogues and Reflections on Indigenous Activism (2011) is published by Zed Books. In 2016 she co-edited with Sekhar Bandyopadhyay a third book Globalisation and the Challenges of Development in Contemporary India, Springer-Verlag.

Her ongoing research addresses the changing agroecological contexts of food production in India by following millet farming and the organic millets value chain via ethnography and film for documentary story-telling.