Janani Balasubramanian is a conceptually driven, multidisciplinary artist and director. Working in close community with scientists, they aim to invite deeper connection with more-than-human worlds and nurture social imagination for care, complexity, and play. They are a key innovator in the fields of art-science collaboration and accessible immersive design.
Janani has received support from several prestigious funders and commissioning organizations, including the Sloan Foundation, Lenore Tawney Foundation, Getty Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Sundance Institute, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Bard Graduate Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, Center for Art Science and Technology at MIT, and MAP Fund, among others. Their work has been presented at dozens of venues internationally, including the New York High Line, San Francisco Exploratorium, Red Bull Arts, Academy of Natural Sciences, Cantor Arts Center, Andy Warhol Museum, Ace Hotel, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Their many awarded residencies include Djerassi Art Center, Loghaven, Green Box Arts, HERE Arts Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Camargo Foundation, The Public Theater, Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Heller Center for the Arts and Humanities, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU, Pioneer Works, Mount Tremper Arts, UCross Foundation, and Sundance Institute Theater Lab. They have also consulted on questions of art-science, co-creation, creative tech, collaboration, and futures for the Doris Duke Foundation, John Giorno Foundation, Cinereach, and Rockefeller Foundation. Janani coaches fellow creatives in the MAP Fund SPA program and New Inc.
They have been the artist-in-residence with the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History since 2017 and are a member of the Guild of Future Architects. They were 2023-2024 Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University and are a 2025 Lenore Tawney Fellow at John Michael Kohler Arts Center and 2024-2025 VPA Visiting Artist at Stanford University. Their co-authored book Undisciplined: Radical Strategies for Growing Artist-Scientist Collaborations is forthcoming from University of California Press.
