RADHIKA SUBRAMANIAM is a curator, editor and writer with an interdisciplinary practice.  Through exhibition, public art, and texts, she explores the poetics and politics of crises and surprises, particularly urban crowds, walking, cultures of catastrophe, art, and human-animal relationships.  She is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design where, from 2009-17, she was the first Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC). She has received 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.

While at GIDEST, Radhika will be completing her book on a medieval elephant embassy.  It draws on textual as well as ethnographic and embodied research in Germany, Italy, Tunisia, and India to tell the story—part animal biography, part narrative of migration and human-elephant relationships, and part quest—and to explore the fool’s errand as part of research.