Faculty

Radhika Subramaniam has an interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer exploring the poetics and politics of crises and surprises as they emerge in walking, art, urban life and human-nonhuman 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 currently 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 the recipient of a Culture and Animals Foundation grant, an International Visiting Curatorship at Artspace Sydney, a SEED Foundation Teaching Fellowship in Urban Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, and artist/writer residencies at The Banff Center, Canada, and the Hambidge Center. In 2018-2019, she was a fellow at the Graduate institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought.

Her book Footprint: Four Itineraries (Essays in the Critical Humanities/np:, 2025) was described in the Los Angeles Review of Books as "an unorthodox guide for how to live on this planet in such uncertain times." Her articles include ‘An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus to the City of New York’ (2024); ‘Notes for a Seedy Politics’ (2023), and ‘Donkeywork: A Eulogy’ (2020). She is presently working on a book on a medieval elephant embassy.

Her curatorial practice is cross-disciplinary and dialogic, committed to public pedagogy, critical urbanism and political and social justice. Curatorial projects include Sprout, Hinge, Nap Wobble (2022, with Dylan Gauthier and Marina Zurkow) 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 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).

PhD. Performance Studies

MS Anthropology

Footprint: Four Itineraries. Essays in the Critical Humanities, np:, 2025

An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus to the City of New York. In Globalization and Planetary Ethics: New Terrains of Consciousness. Edited by Simi Malhotra et al. Routledge, 2024

Notes for a Seedy Politics. In Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change. Edited by Wilma Lukatsch and Carin Kuoni. New York: Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Amherts: Amherst College Press, 2023.

and Carin Kuoni. New York: Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Amherst: Amherst College Press.

Footprint: An Itinerary.  Borderlands journal, Vol. 21, Issue 1, 2022. Special issue on Intersecting Mobilities edited by Miriam Ticktin and Rafi Youatt.

Donkeywork: A Eulogy.  Entry for Animal Laborans.  2020. In Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon.  Edited by Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari.  London: Bloomsbury.

Seeing Sight Unseen.  Book review of Thirty Times a Minute by Colleen Plumb.  Minding Nature, Fall 2020, Vol. 13, No. 3.

Searching Blindly:  Alfredo Jaar’s Searching for Africa in LIFE.  2019 In I Stand in My Place With My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Works from The New School. Edited by Frances Richard.  New York: The New School.

The Elephant’s I: Looking for Abu’l Abbas. 2018 In Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives.  Edited by André Krebber and Mieke Roscher.  London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Round Trips: NY-BOM-NY.  In Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance (Danspace Project Platform 2018 catalogue), March 2018.

Mark Making on the Border.  In Images Unwalled.  Photography-text essay by the Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster (Miriam Ticktin, Radhika Subramaniam, Victoria Hattam, Laura Y. Liu and Rafi Youatt).  Anthropology Now Vol. 9, No. 3.

Flyways (Star 82 Review, Issue 5.2, June 2017)

Loose Connections (in Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency and Cultural Production, edited by Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich, OR Books, 2017), Reprinted in The Believer Logger June 13, 2017

Not as the Crow Flies (La.lit Vol. 7, Green Issue, Kathmandu, 2016),

Small Acts, Forlorn Practices (in Activating Democracy, edited by Sheryl Oring, Intellect, 2016)

In Search of the Indian Cow (in History According to Cattle, edited by Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja, Punctum Books, 2015)

What are we after what are we? Guatemala Después exhibition catalogue. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala: Ciudad de la Imaginación.

Wild Tales, Cosmic Waters.  Catalogue entry for Vibha Galhotra’s Absur-city-pity-dity exhibition brochure, New York: Jack Shainman Gallery. (2015)

Developing Neighbors.  (In Entry Points. The Vera List Field Guide on Art and Social Justice, No. 1. Edited by Carin Kuoni. New York: Vera List Center for Art and Politics in association with Duke University Press, 2015)

Introduction to Artist Feature on Art Environment Action!, in Engage, WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly) Vol. 41, Nos. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2013

(with Nevin Cohen)  Living Concrete/Carrot City: An exhibition platform as a growing medium.  Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development.  Published on-line 11 June 2012  http://dx.doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2012.023.012