Janani Balasubramanian is an artist, director, and leading voice in art-science collaboration and transformative immersive experience design. Janani’s work has been supported by the Sloan Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Getty Foundation, Sundance Institute, Lincoln Center, Jerome Foundation, MAP Fund, and others. His projects have been presented at venues including the High Line, MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum, and London School of Economics.
He has attended residencies at Djerassi, Loghaven, HERE Arts, Camargo Foundation, The Public Theater, MacDowell, and more. He consults on co-creation, creative tech, and futures with foundations like Doris Duke, Giorno, and Rockefeller. He also coaches creatives through MAP Fund and New Inc. A 2025 Lenore Tawney Fellow, he serves on the boards of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Journal on Perspectives in Arts in Health. His co-authored book Art-Science Undisciplined: A Playbook for Transformative Collaboration, for which he received a Sloan Foundation Book Grant, is forthcoming from UC Press in 2026. His immersive project, The Gift, was recently presented at Yale University, The Music Center in Los Angeles, and Stanford Hospital. He is Executive and Artistic Director of Forever Lab at Stanford Medicine where he works with an interdisciplinary team to address existential questions and rupture in the full continuum of human life.
At MacDowell, Balasubramanian worked on a multimedia treatment for Rogue Objects, an immersive operatic work for planetaria.
Portrait by Harrison Truong
