Pragati Gunasekar (b. 1990, Chennai, India) is a New York–based interdisciplinary conceptual artist whose practice spanning painting, sculpture, video, and installation, and grounded in equal parts art, engineering, and research. Her work engages with socio-political histories, dismantling intra-race hierarchies through material and poetic inquiry.
Pragati holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, where she was appointed Adjunct Faculty for the Summer Residency Program (2025). Two of her projects have been sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and her work has been exhibited in New York, Chennai, Dubai, and internationally.
My practice begins where the archive ends — where voices are silenced, names withheld, and truths lie buried beneath layers of caste, race, color, class, gender, and forgetting. I listen into these absences, tracing the contours of stories denied the right to remain.
Drawn to Isabel Wilkerson's insight that "caste is the bones, race the skin," my work traces how hierarchies of racial purity, labor, and visibility move across geographies — from East to West. I interrogate how Brownness, Whiteness, and Blackness are manufactured, policed, and internalized, and how the feeling of "not-enoughness" migrates across bodies and borders. I treat caste as a global architecture of belonging and exclusion, slowing its mechanisms so the unseen and unspoken can surface.
Through painting, installation, and quiet acts of making, I work with materials that hold memory — substances shaped by labor, ritual, and decay. The body itself becomes a site of memory; materials become vessels for what official histories cannot contain. Drawing from testimony, refusal, and ancestral knowledge, I do not seek to romanticize pain, but to name what is ongoing and still urgent.
Pragati has led 300+ workshops for over 1,000 participants across India, the US, Canada, and Dubai — in corporate, educational, and community settings.
She has also conducted workshops dedicated to COVID-19 relief and social impact.