Artists & Associates

Natasha Raheja teaches anthropology and documentary production as an Assistant Professor at Cornell. Her ethnographic filmmaking practice foregrounds presence blurs the lines between anthropologists and their interlocutors, the observers and the observed. Raheja’s first film, Cast in India, raised questions around the relationship between built infrastructure in New York City and labor infrastructure in Howrah, India in the context of everyday urban objects such as manhole covers. Her current writing and video project explores relationships between nationalistic migration policy, state machinery, and modes of religio-national belonging in the context of India’s special visa regimes for religious minorities from Pakistan. Her research has received generous support from the Fulbright Commission, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the NYU Vice Provost’s office and several other endowments. Her films have screened at colleges and festivals nationally and internationally and my publications have featured in the Journal of Refugee Studies, American Anthropologist, and Visual Anthropology Review.