Kalpana
Subramanian

Kalpana Subramanian is an artist-filmmaker and a Ph.D. candidate in Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her films explore materiality, consciousness, and poetics of light and breath. She addresses cinematic embodiment both in her films and research, engaging non-Western philosophical perspectives. In 2015-2016 she was a Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow at the Brakhage Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her five-part series Light Mediated: Eyes on Brakhage (2016) critically responds to Stan Brakhage’s aesthetic vision and notions of the avant-garde from a transcultural perspective. Her recent film Tattva (2018) explores notions of the body and cinema, combining autoethnography, microbiology and poetry to unsettle imagined boundaries between human-nonhuman, subject-object, matter and spirit. 

Subramanian’s short films have been screened at various international festivals including Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (Japan), Interfilm Berlin, Toronto International Film Festival, Digital Anthropologies (France), Wildscreen UK, Olhar de Cinema (Brazil), ULTRACinema MX (Mexico), and Antimatter Media Art (Canada) among others. She has received various honors including the UK Environmental Film Fellowship (2006), Awards for Creative Approach, Cinematography and Conservation at the Montana CINE International Film Festival (2003, 2005), Jury’s Special Mention at the CMS Vatavaran International Film Festival (2007), Audience Award at the Documentary Festival of History and Archeology in Italy (2015) and the Audi Design Award in 1996. Subramanian has been teaching film and media in undergraduate programs in India and the US since 2006. She is also a vocalist and an author of four childrens’ books.