Ranu Mukherjee was appointed dean of the largest of CalArts’ six schools of visual and performing arts in 2024. Before joining CalArts, she was a professor and chair of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco (CCA), where she also was on the faculty of the Graduate Fine Art Program, serving terms as chair and assistant chair. Before moving to California, she spent eight years on faculty in Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
CalArts’ history of radical pedagogy and visionary artwork has long been an influence on her. She finds the way the School of Film/Video holds together distinctive models and resources in an environment of personal choice, to support students’ vision and creation, endlessly inspiring--particularly in this moment when the critical role moving images play in the culture at large cannot be overstated.
As a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Ranu works with animation and choreography, painting, textiles, installation, and performance. She connects questions around ecology, time, diaspora, and the experiences of women to the history of futurisms, speculative fiction, and ruptured colonial legacies. She also takes an ecology-based approach to pedagogy and leadership, informed by living questions and a focus on open dialogue, collective health, and artistic innovation.
Her extensive international exhibition and screening history includes projects at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, and Karachi Biennial (2019). She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco/New York, which published her first monograph, Shadowtime, in 2021. Recent honors include an Artadia Award (2023) and a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship (2019).
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Escalette Collection at Chapman University, Orange, California; JP Morgan Chase Collection, New York; the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; the Oakland Museum of California; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the San Francisco International Airport, among others. She is one of the co-creators of 0rphan Drift, an artist avatar making combined media works since their formation in London in 1994.
She serves on the boards of directors at the San Jose Museum of Art and Southern Exposure, and is the proud mother of teenage triplets.
