Ranu Mukherjee

Ranu Mukherjee (born 1966) is a multi-disciplinary American contemporary artist of Indian and European descent based in San Francisco, California.

After earning her degrees in art, she began teaching at Goldsmiths College in London in 1994. In 2002 She moved to San Francisco, California, where she teaches at California College of the Arts.

Art career Best known for creating strongly colored large scale installations that combine mediums such as print, paint, and drawings, her work has focus on topics such as colonialism, feminism, and ecology.

Mukherjee has stated that most of her work comes from a neo-futurist perspective as she aims to generate creative thinking among her audience. She also penned the term "hybrid film" as a label for her animated art that combines painted, photographic, and digital work into unique pieces.

Ranu Mukherjee co-founded 0rphan Drift, a collaborative artist and avatar, in London in 1994. For a decade, 0rphan Drift collaborated with numerous people on mostly site-specific works. As an artistic entity, 0rphan Drift is known for immersive and visually complex works which use the sample and the remix extensively. It produced video and AV performance, collage, text and print works, and published the cyberpunk novel 0(rphan)<d(rift) Cyberpositive.

In 2006, Ranu Mukherjee and fellow co-founder Maggie Roberts restarted 0rphan Drift as a duo. They believed 0rphan Drift’s approach could be applied to the new era of social media, Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality. In its latest manifestation, 0rphan Drift considers AI through the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness.

Mukherjee worked solely with the artist collaborative between 1994 and 2005.

In December 2025, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts awarded Mukherjee its 2026 Ruth Award.

Select exhibitions

Solo exhibitions 2018 A Bright Stage, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

Collections

San José Museum of Art “Ranu Mukherjee.” In The Make. Accessed March 19, 2021 “Ranu Mukherjee - Gallery Wendi Norris: San Francisco.” Gallery Wendi Norris | San Francisco. Gallery Wendi Norris | San Francisco, October 20, 2020