Radhika Subramaniam is a curator and writer with an interdisciplinary practice that deploys such platforms as exhibitions, texts and public art interventions as conscious forms of knowledge-making. She is interested in the poetics and politics of crises and surprises, particularly urban crowds, cultures of catastrophe and human-animal relationships. She was the first Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC) at The New School from 2009-2017 and is also Associate Professor of Visual Culture in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design. Previously Director of Cultural Programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, she was founding executive editor of an interdisciplinary journal, Connect: Art. Politics. Theory. Practice. She is presently working on a book on a medieval elephant embassy and a series of essays on the footprint.
Her curatorial practice is cross-disciplinary and dialogic, committed to public pedagogy, critical urbanism and political and social justice. Curatorial projects include Art in Odd Places: Number (2013) and Sign (2009, with Erin Donnelly), Abecedarium for Our Times (Apexart, 2008), and Cities, Art and Recovery (LMCC, 2005–2006), a major two-year international initiative focused on art and culture in the aftermath of catastrophe. At the SJDC, she has developed dialogic curatorial platforms such as Living Concrete/Carrot City (2010, with Nevin Cohen), #searchunderoccupy (2012, collaboratively curated), Art Environment Action! (2012), Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story (2013, with Margot Bouman) and Offense and Dissent: Image, Conflict, Belonging (2014, with Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore).