Anooj Bhandari
Fall 2026 Space Grant Resident Artist
EmergeNYC (2017)
Anooj Bhandari (he/him) is an artist who attempts to build real-life moments that feel like witnessing animation. Drawn to aesthetics that sit somewhere between a Shel Silverstein drawing and an episode of the Twilight Zone, he is particularly intrigued by the ways the endearing softness of illustration and the eerie mysticism of the unknown can weave together to ignite communal daydreaming (if we can be curious here and now, what else can we think about with possibility, together?). Specializing experimental non-fiction and magical realism for the page, stage, and screen, he is interested in bringing to life and visibility the multiple social histories that sit behind every interaction, and how we can uplift the deepening of relationships with our ecosystems as the play-space for a free future. He believes in the relationship between artist and audience to be one of poetry// The artist again and again releasing perfection in the name of iterations, and the audience growing their own autonomy by allowing their imagination to fill the gaps between each try.
Anooj loves the idea of Ras, juice, or divine essence, within the classical Indian arts as the goal for the relationship between artist and audience. He equally loves the task of testing the hypothesis that the punk, the queer, and the experimental are divine forces in themselves. With special attention to divinity’s first rule, to not ask question that one already knows the answer to, Anooj’s work as an artist also embeds itself into his community organizing work, creating micro-communities where people can feel the changing weight of the world’s many, grief-filled questions, when asked in company; microcosms where when folks depart, the question of who was artist and who was audience hopefully feels like the least significant question, altogether.