Anshul Roy (b. 1997, India) is a visual artist and educator with an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY. In 2020, he received a B.Tech in Bioengineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, where he became interested in the intersection of STEM and Arts and how these diverse knowledge systems could merge. Roy’s current artistic practice is inspired by Postcolonial discourses, exploring issues like identity, historical memory, cultural representation, and visual ethics. He is particularly interested in probing how British colonizers employed photography in India for “othering” and visual propaganda, and how these ethnographic photos exist in our contemporary institutional archives. Through appropriation techniques and digital media, Roy recontextualizes such historical photographs to question and challenge their enduring impact on collective consciousness.
His work has been exhibited in prestigious venues like the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery (Denver, CO), where he received the “Best in Show” award in 2024 for his project Rage Against the Archive. Roy has also shown his work at places such as the Art Gallery of Peterborough (Ontario, Canada), IEEE VIS Arts Program (St. Pete Beach, FL), :iidrr Gallery (Manhattan, NY), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), The Photographers’ Gallery (London, UK), SPE Media Festival (St. Louis, MO) and Society for Visual Anthropology’s Film and Media Festival (Tampa, FL). In 2024, he was a student at the School for Poetic Computation and an Artist-in-Residence at the ESRC-funded Digital Good Network, where he further refined his art practice.