Charu Maithani is a researcher who organises her inquiries in form of writings and curated projects. Her work sits at the intersection of media theory, digital art, and visual culture. She has recently submitted her first sole-authored book manuscript, on screens in contemporary postmedia assemblages, to Routledge/T&F (formerly Amsterdam University Press), where it is under review. Her writing has appeared in journals including Convergence and Media-N, and in the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art series, spanning topics from the agential realism of Google Maps navigation to chroma screens and race, and the aesthetics of error, glitch, and noise.
Her emerging research examines generative AI and visual culture, interrogating how AI-generated images encode dominant visual epistemologies and developing decolonial frameworks for machine vision. This research has a strong public-facing dimension: she was selected for the UNSW Centre for Ideas’ One Big Idea program (2025), pitching “Rewiring AI” at the State Library of NSW, and presented “Look Again: Why AI Images Don’t Tell the Whole Picture” at AI: Breakthrough or Breaking Point? (2026), a major event co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the UNSW Centre for Ideas.
Before beginning her doctoral studies at UNSW, Maithani built a decade-long professional trajectory spanning contemporary art spaces, cultural organisations, feature film production, and broadcast television. This diverse background brings both practical and theoretical expertise to her teaching and research. She completed her MA in Aural and Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College, London, in 2010, and her PhD from UNSW in 2021. Her research has been supported by fellowships from Sarai-CSDS and the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA). As a curator, she has led major projects including proprioception.in (2016), co-curated Foveal Experiments (2015) and the Students Biennale at Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014), and served as a Curator and Programmes Manager at Khoj Studios in Delhi (2010–2013), coordinating international residencies and exhibitions.
Maithani is a Lecturer in the School of the Arts & Media (SAM), UNSW, Sydney.
Contact via email at charumaithani[at]gmail[dot]com.