Dr. Lakshmi Padmanabhan

Biography

Lakshmi Padmanabhan is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the School of Communication, specializing in Screen Cultures within the Radio/Television/Film department. She is also affiliated with the departments of Performance Studies and Asian Languages & Cultures. Her academic research covers the histories of political cinema, nonfiction film, and minoritarian visual cultures. Her writing and teaching are rooted in discourses of anticolonial thought, Marxist aesthetics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Padmanabhan is currently working on a book project titled 'Documentary Degree Zero,' which theorizes political realism in Indian documentary and examines its role in modern historiography. Her academic articles have been published in prestigious journals such as Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, and Art History. She is a recipient of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities fellowship at Northwestern and the UNDO Colab Fellowship in Brooklyn, NY. Padmanabhan earned her doctorate in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College's Society Fellows program. Her experience also includes programming film and video art at various venues and serving on juries for film festivals.

Research Interests

Experience