Location: Los Angeles, CA*
Medium: Painting, video, installation
Website: ranumukherjee.com
Ranu Mukherjee was born in 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, and has lived and worked in San Francisco for over twenty years. She received her BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1988 and her MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 1993. She was a Professor and Chair of Film at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco for many years and is currently Dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. She is a co-founder of Orphan Drift, a London-based cyber-feminist collective active since 1994. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Asian Art Museum, the de Young Museum, KADIST, the Oakland Museum of California, the San José Museum of Art, and the San Francisco International Airport.
Her awards include a 2025 Ruth Foundation for the Arts Award, a 2023 Artadia Award, a 2020 Pollock-Krasner Grant, a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center (2019–2024), and a Facebook Artist in Residence (2020). In 2025 she was commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and SF Ballet to create a large-scale curtain drop for the War Memorial Opera House.
Mukherjee makes collage-based paintings and film installations that cultivate ecological, somatic, feminist, and multidimensional perspectives on time, energy, and power emerging from ruptured colonial legacies. Her work is marked by deliberately saturated color, the collision of tempos, and a sensual materiality built through numerous imperceptible layers that evoke questions of visibility, legibility, and abstraction. Recent work is guided by the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration, motherhood and transnational feminisms. She coined the term “shadowtime” in 2015 with the Bureau for Linguistical Reality: the feeling of living simultaneously in two distinct time scales, or the consciousness that the near future may be drastically different from the present. Her immersive video installations have been presented internationally at the Singapore Biennale, the Karachi Biennial, and the Berardo Museum in Lisbon.
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