Priyanka Dasgupta has been part of the media arts faculty at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development, Department of Art & Arts Professions, since 2012. In this time, she has worked for both the Undergraduate Art, and Graduate Art + Education programs here, teaching courses including Fundamentals of Video Art, 4D Fundamentals, Visual Culture & Media Literacy and Interdisciplinary Studio. In 2017, Dasgupta transitioned into the position of lead faculty for the BFA Senior Studios and program coordinator for the Senior Honors Studio Program, inheriting this position from Ian Cooper, one of the founding members of the program, along with Jesse Bransford, the department chair.
Dasgupta’s installations include photography, video, text, sound and sculpture, trespassing boundaries between history and story-telling. Recent exhibitions of her work include SculptureCenter (2018), Abrons Arts Center (2017), Shirin Gallery (2015) and the Queens Museum (2014) in New York, the Asian Arts Initiative (2017) in Philadelphia, the Changjiang Museum of Contemporary Art in China (2015), Galleria di Piazza San Marco (2012) in Italy, the British Film Institute (2010) in London and the Lalit Kala Akademi (2010) in New Delhi.
Dasgupta is currently developing work in collaboration with Chad Marshall towards re-contextualizing desire and privilege in the United States. Dasgupta has an MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice, City College/CUNY (2017), MA in Studio Art, NYU/ICP (2003), and BA in English Literature, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi (2000). She was born in Kolkata, India, in 1979, and lives and works in Harlem, New York. www.priyankadasgupta.com
Previous Senior Studio Program Coordinator
Ian Cooper was on the sculpture faculty at New York University’s Steinhardt School Department of Art & Arts Professions from 2005 to 2017. Over those twelve years he taught Fundamentals of Sculpture I & II, Introduction to Sculpture, Projects in Sculpture: Soft Sculpture, and Projects in Sculpture: Advanced Processes. Cooper was also a core member of the Senior Studio faculty, and in 2014 replaced then department chair, Jesse Bransford as lead faculty of the Senior Studio program, and was simultaneously named program coordinator for Bransford’s newly minted Senior Honors Studio program wherein, with Tammy Brown, he co-conceived and architected this multi-faceted collaboration with the studio art department, the Institute of Fine Arts and 80WSE Gallery.
In 2017, Cooper left academia to become the Creative Director of Monkeypaw Productions, Academy Award winning filmmaker Jordan Peele’s company, where he oversees development and production, as well as being Peele’s feature film producing partner. In the past several years Cooper has produced two critically acclaimed box office successes: Peele’s US (2019) and Nia DaCosta’s CANDYMAN (2021). Cooper is also producing Peele’s forthcoming NOPE, set for a summer 2022 release.
Cooper has had solo exhibitions at Downstairs Projects, Brooklyn; Halsey McKay, East Hampton and New York; Sandroni.Rey, Los Angeles; and CUE Arts Foundation, New York. His work has been exhibited both in the United States and abroad at such galleries and institutions as Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles; Planthouse, New York; Tracy Williams, LTD, New York; Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York; Nice & Fit, Berlin; Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich; Locust Projects, Miami; The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and The Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. Cooper’s work has been written about in The New York Times, Artforum, Art In America, Time Out, and other notable publications, and is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Cooper was born in New York City in 1978 and lives and works in Los Angeles.