Vyjayanthi Rao

Vyjayanthi V. Rao is an anthropologist, writer and curator focusing on displacement, memory, heritage and imaginaries of the future, with a particular interest in speculative practices in contemporary social life. She explores the connections between violence, ruination, uncertainty and speculation in contemporary culture and has published widely on these subjects. Her work draws on extensive fieldwork in India since the 1990s and more recent work in the United States. Her research combines oral history and interviews with visual research and mapping at different scales to study the networked architecture of localities.

Her academic writing includes, among others, the edited volumes Speculation Now: Essays and Artworks, a set of multi-disciplinary reflections on speculation and speculative practices in contemporary life and Occupy All Street: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro, a collection of essays exploring the spatial transformation of Rio in the shadow of the 2016 Olympic Games.

She is the founder of two collective practices - the Spatial Ethnography Laboratory and Samooha, bringing together artists, activists and architects to investigate and represent complex spatial conditions. Her work has been shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Venice Architecture Biennale. Along with Tau Tavengwa (African Center for Cities, University of Cape Town), she co-curated the exhibition Multiplicity for the 6th Edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in 2022.

Rao received her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago and has held appointments at Yale University, The New School for Social Research and at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Since 2019, she has been a member of the Senior Editorial Board of the journal Public Culture (Duke University Press).