Anshul Roy (b. 1997, India) is a visual artist with an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University in New York. 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 the Arts and how these diverse knowledge systems could merge. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Critical Media Practices department of the University of Colorado Boulder.
Roy’s 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 at venues like ACM SIGGRAPH, 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 like 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), Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa, India), Society for Photographic Education's Media Festival (St. Louis, MO) and the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Film and Media Festival (Tampa, FL).