About

Lakshmi Padmanabhan is an assistant professor in the department of Radio, TV, Film, where she teaches in the Screen Cultures doctoral program and is affiliated with the MFA in Documentary Media. She is also affiliate faculty in the departments of Comparative Literature, Performance Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures. Her academic research spans the histories of political cinema, nonfiction film, experimental film, and minoritarian visual cultures. Her writing and teaching are anchored in the discourses of anticolonial thought, Marxist aesthetics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Her current book project, Documentary Degree Zero, develops a theory of political realism in Indian documentary through a conceptual elaboration of documentary's function as a medium of modern historiography. Documentary Degree Zero provides an alternative genealogy of political cinema and Marxist aesthetics in the postcolony by reading documentary dialectically as a medium of statecraft and as a form of counter-cinema.

Padmanabhan is the editor of the volume Forms of Errantry on the films of Miryam Charles. Her academic writing has appeared in journals including Art History, Camera Obscura, Cultural Critique, JCMS, Women & Performance, and New Review of Film and Television. Her essays, criticism and reviews have been published in n+1, e-flux, Seen, Public Books, Jewish Currents, and Post45.

She has also curated experimental film and video art at venues including e-flux screening room, DocLisboa, Block Museum, BRIC Arts and Magic Lantern Cinema, in Providence, RI.

Padmanabhan earned her Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College from 2018-2020.