Kurt Behrendt received both his MA (1991) and PhD (1997) in Indian Art History from UCLA. His dissertation, “Architecture of Devotion: Image and Relic Shrines of Gandhara,” became the basis of his first book, The Buddhist Architecture of Gandhara (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004). Since that time he has co-edited the book, Gandhāran Buddhism: Archaeology, Art, Texts, with Pia Brancaccio (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006) and published The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is currently Assistant Curator. Dr. Behrendt’s current research focuses on Buddhist art and archaeology of the sixth through ninth centuries on the Indian subcontinent. Specifically, he is interested in early esoteric practices in Western Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Kashmir and Northwest Pakistan that later became popular under the Palas in North India and by extension in Western and Central Tibet by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.