Chitra Ganesh — Artist Biographical Backgrounds

Chitra Ganesh is an artist based in New York who makes videos, drawings, prints, collages, fillms, and installations about feminism, South Asian identity, LGBTQ+ identity, skill-sharing, storytelling, and the environment.

BIOGRAPHY:

• Born in 1975 in New York City
• Graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and earned an MFA from Columbia University in 2002
• Won a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts in 2012 and named Robina Foundation Fellow for Arts and Human Rights at Yale University Law School in 2015
• Currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
• Often uses science fiction, fantasy, and futurism in connection with ancient history to explore ideas of gender, femininity, and power, imagining feminist utopias and challenging the expectation for women of color to be ‘respectable’
• Explores storytelling representations of power and translation with comics and sequential images
• Promotes skill-sharing and collective knowledge, especially among queer and transgender individuals

“I feel that exposing…pain with a sense of agency is really powerful. It’s not a kind of victimization. I think empathy is as important as fantasy, and art enables empathy.”

Watch Artist Interview Here