Fall 2015
Kalpana Subramanian is an artist-filmmaker and researcher from India, presently on a Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship at the Film Studies Program at University of Colorado Boulder. Her art-based research project is an aesthetic enquiry into selected works of Stan Brakhage. The aim of the project is to expand her own artistic practice by responding to Brakhage's work and identify aesthetic frameworks for comparison between experimental moving image practice across cultures.
Subramanian graduated from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, in 2000 with a specialization in Film and Video Communication. Her short films have been screened at several international festivals including the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Interfilm Berlin, Green Film Festival Korea, Wildscreen UK, International Festival Signes de Nuit (Paris), and Planet in Focus (Toronto). Her films have received awards for creative approach, cinematography, and conservation message.
She has worked extensively with the Sacred World Research Laboratory, an award-winning art and design think tank, making moving image works for interactive cultural exhibits and digital museums including The Crossing: Living, Dying and Transformation in Banaras, The Eternal Gandhi Multimedia Museum, Planet Health 2010 and Musical Landscapes and the Goddesses of Music. In 2006, she won the UK Environmental Film Fellowship in 2006 for her film Turtles in a Soup that exposed the illegal trade of freshwater turtles in India.
She was artist-in-residence at Stadtmuehle Willisau (Switzerland), in 2013 and Artestudio Ginestrelle (Italy), in 2014. Her academic experience includes teaching as an associate professor for several years, and also leading the course between 2012-13, in the Nottingham Trent University's undergraduate Communication Design program, Pearl Academy, New Delhi. Subramanian is also the author of the illustrated children's book trilogy, The World of Anahi and Vir, published by Little Latitude, 2011 and is completing her fourth children's book.