I’ve taught and guest taught studio courses, workshops, and seminars for high school, community college, undergraduate, graduate student, and adult audiences. My teaching practice emerges from and informs my practice as an artist and researcher. To me, teaching is a worldbuilding opportunity, and I like to build worlds where the scientific, artistic, personal, and social questions my students and I explore together are situated in wondrous continuum.  My workshops and classes often include multimedia art creation, games, creative research, accessibility/disability in immersive artmaking, intersections of art and physics, history of science, and/or feminist science studies.

Art-Physics Teaching


Some of my favorite teaching has been in the realm of experimental, collaborative art-physics pedagogy. Below is the description art-astrophysics course I co-taught with physicist collaborator Afra Ashraf:

CSRE 271: Peering into Darkness is an interdisciplinary undergraduate research seminar guest taught by IDA visiting artist Janani Balasubramanian & collaborator Afra Ashraf. Together, we will joyfully open up science as a space to interrogate social questions and personal subjectivity. Students will explore weekly research themes such as observing, ghosts, fragmentation, and fables through critical texts, guest lectures, and practices of astrophysics and artmaking. Prerequisites include curiosity and play.

Additionally, Afra and I co-taught art-astrophysics seminars for high school and community college students through Stanford’s interdisciplinary STEM to SHTEM program in 2020 and 2022. 

Additional Teaching Experience

An abridged selection of my other teaching, lecturing, and facilitation engagements are listed below. Extended (as opposed to single-day) engagements are highlighted in bold.

2022: Theater Mitu, guest lecture on Multimedia Art Creation for cohort of BIPOC new genre live art makers
2022: Bard Graduate Center Lab for Teen Thinkers, guest workshop on creative writing with objects
2022: Mozilla Festival, workshop on found text as a method of collaborative creative research
2022: Stanford STEM to SHTEM program, art-astrophysics seminar ‘Celestial Representation’ for a cohort of community college students in the Bay Area
2022: CUNY Macaulay Honors College, guest lecture and workshop on art-science co-creation
2022: Princeton University, guest lecture on art-science co-creation
2022: Stanford Arts Institute, guest lecture on art-science co-creation

2021: Pioneer Works, class on discovering creative research questions
2021: EMERGE, workshop on creative research for emerging artists of color
2021: Asian American Writer’s Workshop, workshop on astrophysics and found poetry
2021: Stanford University, art-astrophysics seminar ‘Peering into Darkness’
2021: Bard Fischer Center, semester-long facilitated creative workshop with a group of 10 Black and Indigenous youth activists from around the United States
2021: Princeton University, guest lecture on creative research 
2021: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, staff workshop on discovering new metaphors
2021: Harvard University Art Department, artist talk and workshop on research-based creation

2020: Stanford STEM to SHTEM program, instructor for art-astrophysics seminar ‘Ways of Seeing’ for a cohort of high school students
2020: Yale School of Drama, invited lecture on speculative future, access, and the social imagination
2020: Princeton University, guest lecture on art and astrophysics

2019: Creativity & Innovation at Colorado College, innovator-in-residence co-leading a 2-week laboratory on art-science co-creation
2019: University of Washington, lecture on audio augmented reality work
2019: Brooklyn College, master class on art-science co-creation

2018: University of Colorado, practicum on devised theater making