The digital art news platform e-flux covers the Stanford 2024-2025 Visiting Artist cohort in a brief article, featuring a brief profile of Janani. Read more about all eight of the exceptional Stanford Visiting Artists here.

Stanford University welcomes Janani Balasubramanian as a member of the cohort of Visiting Artists for the 2024-2025 academic year. The visiting artist programs supported by the Office of the Vice President for the Arts and Stanford’s academic departments offer opportunities for leading artists from all disciplines to engage deeply with students and faculty, and share their work with the broader Stanford community. Read more about Janani’s work at Stanford as well as the work of the other phenomenal artists in the cohort here.

Stanford celebrates the work of this year’s cohort of visiting artists, with an article that includes coverage of Janani’s fellowship and a presentation of The Gift. Read/watch more here.

Green Box Arts invites you to a work-in-progress presentation of Rogue Objects. Artists Janani Balasubramanian and Sultana Isham will share excerpts of the evolving methodologies, text, visual life, and musical score in the work. The event is free and open to the public. Read more about the work and RSVP here.

UC California Press congratulates Janani and Natalie Gosnell on winning a Sloan Foundation Grant for their upcoming book Undisciplined: Radical Strategies for Growing Artist-Scientist Collaborations. View post here.

OPERA America has announced a cohort of seven women composers who will receive $100,000 in grants towards their new opera works, including Sultana Isham who will be awarded for her current collaborative work-in-progress with Janani. Read more here about the extraordinary group of grantees, as well as Sultana and Janani’s immersive opera for planetaria, Rogue Objects.

Janani hosts a new four-part podcast series: Encounters: Where Creative and Scientific Inquiry Meet. Encounters delves into the evolving nexus of creative and scientific inquiry at the dynamic research ecosystem of Stanford University. Each episode will discuss how art catalyzes cross-disciplinary play—from the physics and metaphors of the interstellar medium to how information theory connects to mythology from the ancient past—featuring leading researchers, innovators, and thought visionaries. The series will also provide listeners with a window into Balasubramanian’s residency with field scenes captured at key moments across campus. Learn more and listen to the series here. New episodes drop on Wednesdays.

The Stanford Report has announced the program of presentations by visiting artists this season, including a special installation of The Gift. To read more about this presentation, as well as the incredible selection of performances, workshops, installations, and screenings happening at Stanford this spring click here.

Janani and their collaborators will be presenting The Gift at Stanford Memorial Church on Wednesday May 1st from 6-8PM. This event is open to the public. For more information click here.

Itziar Barrio’s film A Demon that Slips into Your Telescope While You’re Dead Tired and Blocks the Light was recently featured as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s Cosmos Cinema Program. The film comprises interviews with experts in astrobiology, astrophysics, and sociocultural anthropology alongside aerial images from NASA’s archives and original scenes dramatizing a speculative fiction by Janani Balasubramanian. For more information on the film and the festival read here.

Janani and composer Sultana Isham have been announced as recipients of this year’s upcoming Green Box Residency, situated in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado. Read more about their plans for collaboration, as well as the other outstanding artists in the Green Box residency cohort here.

An upcoming exhibition of the Gift at the LA Music Center has been announced. The presentation will include an orchestral score and a special preview of the work for young audiences presented inside the 100-inch telescope dome at the Mount Wilson Observatory. Read more here.

Janani will be offering a presentation of the immersive, audio augmented reality game Heisenberg at the 2024 Worlds in Play conference, hosted by Arizona State University. Worlds in Play is a “five day gathering of game and theater artists exploring new forms of agency in storytelling and experience.” Read more about the conference and to purchase tickets here.

Janani has been named the 2023-2024 Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University, hosted by the Physics Department, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Electrical Engineering Department, and Stanford Compression Forum. Read more about the residency and the array of other visiting artists at Stanford here.

As part of their residency in the Leonardo @ Djerassi program- Janani and their collaborator, Dr. Natalie Gosnell will present on their installation piece The Gift and discuss their ongoing work nurturing artist-scientist collaborations during the residency’s Open Studios event. 

Janani and their collaborator, observational astrophysicist Dr. Natalie Gosnell, are among the summer 2023 cohort for the prestigious and highly competitive Leonardo@Djerassi Art Center residency – a unique program that welcomes both artists and scientists engaging in disciplinarily cross-cutting work.

Read about the full residency cohort here.

Janani has been named a 50th Anniversary Fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an initiative aimed at supporting 50 artists of color who are new to the residency center.

The Amherst Student wrote about Janani’s talk “Waking the Sleeping Metaphors in Science”, hosted by the Amherst Physics Department. It’s a lovely write-up of Janani’s work in creating large-scale, immersive work that combines art and science.

“[Student] Isla Steinman spoke to the importance of cultivating connections between art and science. ‘We tend to divide disciplines, like arts [separately] from science,’ she said. ‘But what [Balasubramanian] does is a good example of the fact that these can be interdisciplinary, and can work together to create something better than if they were separate.’

Read the full review here.

Janani delivered a shared talk with their collaborator Dr. Natalie Gosnell as part of the event “MATTER AND MEANING: Transdisciplinary Collaboration as Feminist Practice”, hosted by Colorado College. Together they discussed the intentions, strategies, and benefits of their collaboration of over five years, and touched on how their work encompasses many of the strategies advocated by scholars in feminist science and technological studies. Janani and Dr. Gosnell also presented a talk on their installation project The Gift– which is currently being shown at Colorado College Fine Arts Center.

Watch the full talk here.

Janani has been named an inaugural Lenore Tawney fellow at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, to create original creative work that responds to and engages with the Lenore Tawney collection. It’s a total honor to be included among such an accomplished and creative group of fellows.

Janani has been selected as one of the HERE Arts Center resident artists for their in-process immersive work for dome cinema, Rogue Objects. Learn more about the residency and all the other terrific resident artists here.

Southwest Contemporary reviewed The Gift at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs, which is running till June 18th.

“The project is also a stark reminder that two worlds colliding—creativity and science—can have a powerful outcome. Astrophysicists aren’t often considered artists, but Gosnell and Balasubramanian both find solace in the space where the two disciplines meet.”

The Gift opens at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs and will be up from March 3-June 18, 2023. The exhibit includes a companion series of works created by local high school students.

Learn more and reserve tickets here.

The Gift premieres today at New York Public Library, co-presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are free and the experience is available in English, Spanish, and descriptive audio.

Janani has been selected as one of the Jerome @ Camargo resident artists for their in-process immersive work for dome cinema, Rogue ObjectsRogue Objects. Learn more about the residency and all the other terrific resident artists here.

Bard Graduate Center premiered an exhibition, Threads of Power today. The exhibit includes an interactive storytelling experience, Tracing Lace, by Janani and fellow artist James Harrison Monaco. The exhibition will be open until January 1, 2023. Find out more here.

WHYY Philadelphia published a radio story about How To Get to the River, which opens today at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

How To Get to the River is a 1.5-mile loop from the Academy to the Schuylkill River and back again. Along the way are about 40 pieces of poetry, sound installation, artwork, and interactive signage that attempt to bring people into a closer appreciation for the watershed below their feet, often made invisible by the built urban environment.”

Read the whole review here.

Janani has been named among the inaugural cohort for the Sundance Institute’s Interdisciplinary Art of Practice Fellowship with a wonderful and diverse group of practitioners across film, performance, music, and new media.

Janani takes a lighthearted narrative approach to the mythology and science of black holes in this article for their residency at Pioneer Works.

Janani and their collaborators Dr. Natalie Gosnell and Dr. Andrew Kircher will offer a special presentation today at the 13th annual NORDP Research Development Conference- where they will discuss how interdisciplinary research opportunities have been crucial to the development of their “accessible installation” The Gift. Read further here about this presentation as well as the others featured this year at NORDP.

UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance launches She is Called: Dear Stranger– a media-rich web performance today created in collaboration between the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and a cohort of celebrated composers and theater artists- including Janani. This piece explores themes of gender identity, community, and connection and is currently being developed for the stage. Read more here about the collaborators and process behind the project.

Janani will deliver the Just Futures keynote for the AAARI’s The Need for Asian American Studies conference. This one-day conference “platforms the three As (Academics, Artists, and Activists) to showcase and push the boundaries of “Asian American Studies”. Read more about the conference and reserve tickets here.

“New York Live Arts (Live Arts) continues its conversation series, Bill Chats, on November 11th, 2020. Bill T. Jones, MacArthur Genius Award National Medal of Arts awardee and Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, will have a conversation with the artists and organizers behind The Future is Present. Including Charlotte Brathwaite, Janani Balasubramanian, Justin Hicks, and Sunder Ganglani, the conversation is presented in partnership with Fisher Center at Bard.” For more information and to RSVP please visit here.

The Fisher Center at Bard College announced that its 2020-2021 season will present “virtual and interactive works that focus on healing for troubled times.” Among the works being presented will be The Future is Present: A Casting the Vote Project created in collaboration between youth activists, Bard students, and a creative team of artists- including Janani. “Inside a 7-week art and political action laboratory, the youth leaders will craft a set of core demands and messages for our collective future, which will then be amplified through a series of high-distribution public actions and artistic interventions.” Read more about The Future is Present and the other works to be presented by the Fisher Center this season here.

Janani has been named the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts’ Visiting Artist for 2020. Read more about the Institute for Diversity in the Arts here.

Janani and their collaborator Dr. Natalie Gosnell have been selected as fellows for the Sundance Institute’s Theater Lab 2020 cohort. Read more about the program and the cohort of outstanding fellows here.

The University of Washington’s Meany Center for the Performing Arts is proud to present Heisenberg an audio augmented reality (AR) experience intended for large audiences in public space, written and directed by Janani Balasubramanian. Heisenberg “investigates what happens when we assume others occupy the same realities we do.” Read more and reserve your tickets here.