Janani Balasubramanian is an artist practicing across immersive media, conceptual art, and literary work and in long-term collaborations with scientists. Their work aims to invite deeper connection with nonhuman worlds and nurture social imagination for care, complexity, and play. Janani has received support from several prestigious funders and organizations, including the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Sundance Institute, Pew Center, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, among others. Their work has been presented at dozens of venues internationally, including the San Francisco Exploratorium, Academy of Natural Sciences, Andy Warhol Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their many awarded residencies include The Public Theater, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU, and Sundance Institute Theater Lab. They have been artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History since 2017 and are a member of the Guild of Future Architects.

Janani will be in residence with Sultana Isham and they will spend their month at Green Box writing a dome Opera entitled Rouge Objects, an operatic, immersive, and inviting experience for dome cinema that brings the emerging science of brown dwarfs to audiences around the world. Through original footage, archival materials, and animation built with data from the new James Webb and Gaia space telescopes, and an original operatic score constructed from sonified data of nearby brown dwarfs, Rogue Objects welcomes us into the wonderful life of celestial objects that abound and sing in the dark. The residency will culminate with a workshop presentation of the opera.