Biography:
prajna paramita parasher is a filmmaker/scholar and multimedia artist practicing at the shifting intersection of classical thought and new technologies. Born in the foothills of the Himalayas, she began her education as a filmmaker in Paris and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Currently she is Professor of Art, Film and Cultural Studies, Chair of the Arts, Design and Communication department and Program Director of the Film and Digital Technology program at Chatham University. Her personal focus on postcolonial studies comes to realization in several forms -- films, 2-D art, installations and scholarly writing. Her creative work is experimental and has been shown across the country in venues from small towns to the Smithsonian Institution, Carnegie Museum, Brooklyn Museum, The Nehru Center, London, The Tagore Center, Berlin and the San Francisco Cinematheque. Already part of the canon at major American Universities, her films are used in ethnic, diaspora, cultural and women’s studies. She has received recognition via multiple fellowships, awards and grants.
Education
- MA/Ph.D., Film Studies, Northwestern University (Evanston, ILL), 1994
- BA, Political Science (Hons.) Philosophy (Minor) Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, (New Delhi, India), 1974
Creative Work
My father's studio and the creation of art were basic to my childhood, making inseparable work, politics, the personal and the global. The position of the diasporic woman is both subject and object of my work and reflects an urgency that we take in our own hands the tools and modes of our representation. Every experience alters the next, with the speed of these revisions being the palette on which we mix our images.
Teaching
All of my experiences in the classroom have reinforced my belief that teaching is as instinctive as it is learned. Scholarly and academic at the same moment it is communal and personal, my approach is dialogical from the outset. I create an energetic atmosphere by encouraging students to engage with the issues. My methodology is to move between texts, films, handouts and discussion so that students learn to become fully critical. I organize readings and lessons across disciplinary boundaries and around issues of history, culture and identity.
Recent Work
a past, a present
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sunrise at midnight
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Ultricies lacinia interdum
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what am i seeing?
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many stories – one silence
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who am I seeing?
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should I stop here?
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Documentation of Installation -- Door Without Walls from prajna parasher on Vimeo.
Documentation of Installation — Door Without Walls
by Prajna Paramita Parasher and Deb Ellis, 1989 This experimental documentary looks at the life of Manjula Joshi, an Indian woman from the Punjab who works 12 hours a day making poori bread in a Chicago restaurant. Employing competing words, images, and text, addresses women’s roles in traditional culture, the value of women’s labor, the exploitation of immigrant women, and the experience of immigration.
Documentation of Installation -- The Perfect Cleavage from prajna parasher on Vimeo.
Documentation of Installation -- The Perfect Cleavage
Whether in North or South, the national citizen living under world trade decisions and multi-national corporations must respond to forces as distant/immediate and implacable as physical laws. Globalization, a board-room word, fractures exponentially into multiple localizations as what was imagined becomes concrete things created by living workers at almost invisible distance from the banking and distribution systems which order their work. Manufacturing continues its move southwards as money moves north, the uneven warp and weft of this weave obscuring its dangerous pattern within the rich finished cloth.
Trailer -- Unbidden Voices from prajna parasher on Vimeo.
Unbidden Voices
Unbidden Voices [32 mins.] is an experimental documentry about an Indian female kitchen worker on Chicago's Devon street. The video is about the various roles a woman plays as daughter, wife, mother and widow, centering on labor, self and value.
Trailer -- Heiroglyphics of Commodity from prajna parasher on Vimeo.
Trailer — Heiroglyphics of Commodity
by Prajna Paramita Parasher and Deb Ellis, 1989 This experimental documentary looks at the life of Manjula Joshi, an Indian woman from the Punjab who works 12 hours a day making poori bread in a Chicago restaurant. Employing competing words, images, and text, addresses women’s roles in traditional culture, the value of women’s labor, the exploitation of immigrant women, and the experience of immigration.
Documentation of 'The Braille of Naming' projected onto a perforated braille screen from prajna parasher on Vimeo.
The Braille of Naming
A screen using a poem in braille is used to introduce invisibility alongside the visible. The poem itself is about women's story telling through quilting and speaks to the necessity of silence. The inevitability of silence in any transfer of information impels the idiosyncratic into the generalities of speech. Using typographic elements the poem will be projected onto the screen. The inception of this piece began with the idea to work with Braille and to project onto a Braille screen because the project entailed dealing with the necessary but absent silence in any communication process. I first turned to Sandy Sterner’s poem, “Night Work,” that expresses nonverbally the intervals of meaning displayed by the making of a patchwork quilt. The creation of additional electronic sound/images as well as the perforated screen and its Braille legend came next, “Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.” The manipulation and after effects gives visual shape to the words and the sound design as well as creating the perforations onto the screen create a finished quilt, a final project that is both familiar and a surprise.
Published works
Retrospective Hallucination
echo in bollywood moernities
prajna paramita parasher
Time, Space, Light, Consciousness
S.L. Parasher 1904 – 1990:
KALAA: Field Notes from the Interior
S.L. Parasher
With A Foreword By Richard Lannoy
Get In Touch
If you would like to contact me. Please use the following email to do so.