Pallavi Govindnathan is an Indian-American transnational, interdisciplinary, conceptual visual artist, writer, and educator. She has a doctorate in Gender Studies from Texas Woman’s University and received her MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2012. Pallavi has a BFA from The Savannah College of Art and Design with minors in Drawing and Sculpture.
Pallavi has dedicated her academic life to studying cultural and social concerns that violate human rights, focusing primarily on issues related to social, cultural, religious, and political injustices violating South Asian women. Since 2004, she has been studying acid violence against women in Bangladesh which resulted in a book titled Corrode: An Artist’s Response to Acid Violence in South Asia (2010), and a publication in the Duke University Press journal Public Culture: Society for Transnational Cultural Studies (2010). Since then, she has continued her work on acid violence in Asia with a current focus on India.
Pallavi’s most recent collaborations have been with her family in producing several journal articles published by Taylor and Francis and Oxford University Press. She hopes to turn her dissertation into a published book in 2024, alongside submitting proposals to various NGOs and media agencies to promote the cultivation of gender-sensitive reporting on violence against women.
Though by title, she identifies as a painter, Pallavi has a strong interest in video, photography,
performance, and site-specific sculptures
.
Pallavi in a Nutshell:
She was born in New Delhi, India. She moved to Bangkok, Thailand with her family at the age of eight. Since both her parents are academics, she often traveled with them to other countries, learning a great deal through their research on gender-based violence, land/ property rights, witch hunts, and much more. Summer and winter vacations were very different in her home. After all, in academic homes, work never stops because work is your passion. Her travels to isolated lands exposed her to numerous gender-based injustices from a young age, and at the age of twelve, she held her first solo protest against the ruthless slaughtering of animals and the meat production industry. She became a strict vegetarian, after all, we are what we eat. She later went on to hold other solo protests at her school and became an active member of her school newspaper and the yearbook committee to utilize the platforms to cultivate social justice awareness. In High School, her painting on refugees was selected by the Thai Queen to be displayed at Queen Sirikit’s gallery representing the works of ten emerging artists of Thailand.
She traveled to Savannah, GA to attend The Savannah College of Art and Design, where she majored in painting and minored in drawing and sculpture. In 2013 she left Georgia to begin a new journey as a doctoral student, working as a teaching assistant initially and moving on to teaching her own courses. During her first two years in the Ph.D. program, she had a miscarriage, went through a divorce, adopted a cat, and went on to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. She currently lives with her family in between the US and India.