Ansuman Biswas was born in Calcutta and trained in the UK. He now has an international practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre. With skills in a number of different fields, he has developed a dynamic practice which traverses, translates and transposes across various kinds of borders. An example of this border-crossing is his mapping of Vedic and Buddhist thought to modern debates in science and philosophy, which then find expression in film or performance.

Over the last few years his work has included directing Shakespeare in America, translating Tagore’s poetry from the Bengali, designing underwater sculptures in the Red Sea, living with wandering minstrels in India, being employed as an ornamental hermit in the English countryside, touring with Björk, spending three days blindfolded in an unknown place, travelling with shamans in the Gobi Desert, playing with Oasis, collaborating with neuroscientists in Arizona, living for a week with absolutely nothing but what spectators chose to give him, co-ordinating grassroots activists in Soweto, being sealed in a box for ten days with no food or light, making a musical in a maximum security prison, re-designing Maidstone High Street, being a soloist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, bathing strangers, running seminars on democracy for monks in a Burmese monastery, being locked in a Gothic Tower alone for forty days and nights, and even flying on a real magic carpet in Star City, Moscow.

Ansuman has shown visual and time-based art at Tate Modern, The South London Gallery, The Whitechapel Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, India International Centre, New Delhi, Yerba Buena Centre, San Francisco, and many other galleries and museums around the world. He has worked as a composer at the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House and London’s West End.

Ansuman is a trustee of Arts Catalyst, the science-art agency. He has been part of a pioneering study group on Cultural Utilisation of the International Space Station, for the European Space Agency, and he has had a leading role in developing new models of interdisciplinary collaboration as artist-in-residence with Hewlett-Packard at HP labs in Bangalore. He has also been artist-in-residence at the National Institute of Medical Research (London), at the Headlands Centre (San Francisco), at Portsmouth Cathedral, at the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (China), at The National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), and at NICA (Networking Initiatives in Culture and the Arts) Burma.