Kadambari Baxi

Kadambari Baxi is Department Chair and Professor of Practice in Architecture. In addition, she serves as the Faculty Director of Barnard's Movement Lab, a space for interdisciplinary experimentation in art, performance, and technology.

Kadambari Baxi's current architecture + media practice focuses on designing exhibitions where visual culture, research, and activism converge to foster public pedagogy. Engaging with pressing socio-political issues—including labor in digital ecosystems and construction sites, reproductive healthcare, global climate activism, transboundary air pollution—her work has been exhibited widely internationally.

Recent collaborative projects include: Render Labor: Digitally Built Humanly Automated, a multimedia installation examining synthetic imaging, digital labor, and human-machine interactions, exhibited at the Proyector gallery in Mexico City; Trigger Planting, a large display with data-maps, medicinal plants and herbs, books, etc., exploring the changing landscapes of reproductive health access, installed at the Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning lobby and outdoor gardens at Barnard; Found (abortion) Monument, an installation in a wild meadow at the Unison Sculpture Garden in New York; Climate Justice WTF, a two-channel video diptych addressing global climate activism, screened at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture; and Air Drifts, a film and data-model-object installation on transboundary air pollution, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanjing. Excerpts from these and other projects can be viewed at www.kbaxi.net.

In other notable activities, Kadambari Baxi co-founded WBYA? (Who Builds Your Architecture?), a university-based advocacy group promoting fair labor practices on architectural construction sites worldwide. The group's work has been exhibited at Boston Architecture College, Chicago Art Institute, and at architecture and design biennales in Venice and Istanbul. In her architecture and media practice, as well as in her advocacy initiatives, Baxi works by forming interdisciplinary teams and initiating collaborations with artists, curators, human rights experts, scientists, academics, and students.

In her previous roles, she led a research-based architectural practice in partnership with Reinhold Martin. Their co-authored architectural design projects, under the firm name Martin / Baxi Architects, are published as two books: Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Actar, Spain, 2007) and Entropia (Black Dog Publishing, London, 2001). Additionally, she was a principal of imageMachine, a new media design firm that designed media projects for large nonprofit organizations, including Vera Institute for Justice, Center for Court Innovation, and the Architectural League.

Her academic expertise includes teaching architectural design studios and environmental visualization seminars. She has spearheaded advanced architecture research and design studios that integrate international research, and initiate brief collaborations with architecture schools outside the US. She conducted a series of studios on the topic "Design for Diplomacy" where students traveled to China, Germany, Jordan, Italy and Morocco. She has collaborated with interdisciplinary faculty across campus in anthropology, astronomy, film studies, science, and graduate architecture departments. Her teaching and research activities were awarded grants from Barnard Teaches: Real Place + Digital Access, Mellon Foundation Grant, and the Barnard Presidential Research Award.