Lakshmi Padmanabhan is an assistant professor in the department of Radio, TV, Film, where she teaches in the Screen Cultures doctoral program and is affiliated with the MFA in Documentary Media. She is also affiliate faculty in the departments of Performance Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures. Her academic research spans the histories of political cinema, nonfiction film, experimental film, and minoritarian visual cultures. Her writing and teaching are anchored in the discourses of anticolonial thought, Marxist aesthetics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Her current book project, Documentary Degree Zero, develops a theory of political realism in Indian documentary through a conceptual elaboration of documentary's function as a medium of modern historiography. Documentary Degree Zero provides an alternative genealogy of political cinema and Marxist aesthetics in the postcolony by reading documentary dialectically as a medium of statecraft and as a form of counter-cinema.
Padmanabhan's academic writing has appeared in journals including Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, JCMS, Women & Performance,and Art History. Forthcoming writing include a chapter in the Cinemas of Global Solidarity (ed. Matt Croombs and Masha Salazkina, Oxford UP) and a roundtable on documentary in Indian New Waves (ed. Manishita Dass and Usha Iyer, Oxford UP). She is the editor of the volume Forms of Errantry, on the filmmaking practices of Miryam Charles,published in 2024 with Union Docs and co-editor of "Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform" a special issue of Women & Peformance (2019). Her criticism and reviews have been published in venues including n+1, e-flux, Seen, Public Books, Jewish Currents, and Post45.
Padmanabhan has been awarded a faculty fellowship with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, and the UNDO Colab Fellowship with Union Docs, in Brooklyn, NY. Padmanabhan earned her doctorate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Before joining RTVF, she held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.
In addition to her writing, Padmanabhan develops her research questions through film programming and curation. She has programmed film and video art at venues including Doc Lisboa; e-flux screening room, Union Docs, and BRIC Arts in Brooklyn, NY; and AS220 and Magic Lantern Cinema in Providence, RI; and served as a jury member for the Chicago International Film Festival.