Pallavi Govindnathan is a transnational, interdisciplinary visual artist and a Gender and Violence Studies scholar. Born in India, and grew up in Thailand, she moved to the United States to pursue an undergraduate degree in Fine Art from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1999. She majored in Painting and minored in Drawing and Sculpture. In 2009, she moved to San Francisco to complete a Post-Baccalaureate and a Master’s degree in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Calling various geographical locations her home, she has dedicated her academic life to studying cultural and social concerns and social norms that violate human rights, focusing primarily on violence against women and girls in South Asia. In 2010, Pallavi released a book titled, Corrode: An Artist’s Response to Acid Violence in South Asia, working alongside Cornell Law School’s Avon Center for Women and Justice and Duke University Press’ Public Culture. Pallavi has also been peer-reviewed by Public Culture and several other journals. Her research and activism are based on violence against women, primarily acid violence in South Asia. She has dedicated two decades to examining the cause behind acid attacks globally, and based her doctoral thesis on the representation of acid attacks in Indian news media. Her dissertation simultaneously examined the influence ancient Indian texts and scriptures have on modern-day acid attacks and other forms of violence. Pallavi has also jointly published works on social norms and attitudes toward women’s entitlement to land in India, and on knowledge economy and gender inequality, published by Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press. She has exhibited in Canada, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, and the United States. Her upcoming book, titled, A Battleground of Scars: Acid Violence Against Women in India, is published by Routledge and is due for release in 2026/27. Pallavi teaches Gender Studies and Social Justice courses both in the United States and in India. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.