Ansuman Biswas was born in Calcutta and trained in the UK. He now has an international practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre. He is interested in hybridity and interdisciplinarity, often working between science, art and industry, for instance, or between music, dance and visual art. With skills in a number of different fields, he has developed a dynamic practice which traverses, translates and transposes across various kinds of borders. An example of this border-crossing is his mapping of Vedic and Buddhist thought to modern debates in science and philosophy, which then find expression in film or performance.
He is actively engaged in bridging the gap between science and art. He sits on the Board of Directors of Arts Catalyst, the science-art agency. In 2002-2003 he was artist-in-residence at the National Institute of Medical Research. He has an on-going research interest in consciousness studies, in particular the subjective emotional correlates of objective physiological states. He has had a leading role in developing new models of interdisciplinary collaboration as artist-in-residence with Hewlett-Packard at HP labs in Bangalore. He has been part of a pioneering study group on Cultural Utilisation of the International Space Station, for the European Space Agency. And he has been involved in setting up similar cultural initiatives in conjunction with the Indian Space Research Organization and the National Institute of Advanced Studies, India.
Ansuman is an Associate Artist at Battersea Arts Centre, London, He is on the Advisory Faculty at Maine Summer Dramatic Institute, USA, and a member of the Kira Institute, a cross-disciplinary colloquium on Philosophy of Science at Amherst College, Massachusetts.
He has shown visual and time-based art at Tate Modern, The South London Gallery, The Whitechapel Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, IIC New Delhi, Headlands Centre, San Francisco, and many other galleries and museums around the world. He also runs ongoing projects with diverse partners in Europe, USA, Africa and Asia. He has been artist-in-residence at HP Labs, Bangalore, at the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, China and at NICA (Networking Initiatives in Culture and the Arts) Yangon, Myanmar.