Subhankar Banerjee, professor in the UNM Department of Art, is a photographer, writer, curator, and environmental humanities scholar. He is also the founder and director of the Center for Environmental Arts & Humanities at UNM.
On Earth Day, the Center opened a small exhibition of Banerjee’s work, “BioDiversity,” at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. After being on display for a year, the full contents of the“BioDiversity” exhibit will become part of the permanent archive at the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center at IAS.
Prof. Banerjee was also recently named an invited Resident at the American Academy in Rome, as part of the 2025–2026 Rome Prize announcements. Reflecting on the honor, he shared, “The most important part of the announcement, for me, is the new thematic area at the American Academy in Rome: Environmental Arts & Humanities. Among the inaugural Rome Prize Fellows in this new area are the artist-scholar duo Chuna McIntyre (Yup’ik, Alaska) and Sean Mooney. While I haven’t met Chuna and Sean in person yet, all three of us have served as advisors to our dear friend, Alaska-based Brazilian ornithologist Dr. Liliana Naves, on her fascinating forthcoming paper about a rare early 20th-century Yup’ik mask—depicting a long-billed shorebird—currently housed in a museum in Paris. I’ll be spending March through May 2026 at the American Academy in Rome as the inaugural Resident in Environmental Arts & Humanities.”
In addition, Prof. Banerjee recently learned that four of his large-scale desert photographs from New Mexico will be included in “Witness Nothing,” an upcoming exhibition at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. The works were recently donated by the Lannan Foundation and will be on display from July through December 2025.
Currently, Prof. Banerjee is focused on completing his forthcoming book, “Coexistence: BioDiversity in New Mexico,” which will be published by UNM Press in Fall 2026.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
LEARN MORE about Prof. Subhankar Banerjee by visiting his faculty profile at https://art.unm.edu/profile/subhankar-banerjee
EXPLORE the Center for Environmental Arts & Humanities at UNM by visiting https://art.unm.edu/research/center-for-environmental-arts-humanities
