Rakhee Balaram

Rakhee Balaram is an Associate Professor of Global Art and Art History at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where she specializes in modern and contemporary art. Her work is dedicated to investigating images and their meanings from a global perspective. She teaches courses on world art histories, theories and practices on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. 

Her books include Counterpractice: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Art of French Feminism, which provides an alternative history of art in France after May ’68 (Manchester University Press, 2021). She is a co-editor of a landmark survey of modern and contemporary South Asian art, 20th-Century Indian Art (Thames & Hudson, 2022), which was named a Financial Times Book of the Year in 2022. She has recently published a bilingual catalogue on a 1970s Algerian-born French artist, Sabine Monirys: Messieurs, il fait froid ici (Paris: In Fine, 2024). Her latest publications range from Indian modern artist M.F. Husain and geometry (DAG, 2024) to witches and ecology (Musée de Pont-Aven, 2025).

In Fall 2023 she was named a Michael Ann Holly fellow at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In Spring 2024, she was an invited researcher at the Institut National d'Histoire de l’Art (INHA) in Paris, France. 

Her research has been supported by the Art Histories Fellowship in Berlin, Germany, the ICI Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry, the Tata SPEAR grant at JNU in New Delhi, among others.