Pravah Khandekar is an artist and composer originally from India, currently based in New York City. His work centers in literary, performative and image making practices, mediating international relations, cinema and critical theory. He develops experiments to complicate political, aesthetic and ethical dimensions that write, alter, or damage the limits of contemporary culture and public life. Pravah holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Sir JJ School of Arts, Bombay, India, and a Master’s in Design Studies (Ecologies) from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Pravah is also a musician, vocalist, and a percussionist whose practice navigates the intersections of improvisatory traditions rooted in South Asia and the Middle East. Initiated into music by his first teacher, his mother, he later pursued intensive vocal training under Ustad Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar within the Dagar-vani lineage of Dhrupad. His current projects operate across multiple sonic genealogies, engaging critically with Black American music, Klezmer lineages, and contemporary experimental practices.

His methods inhabit the problematic ground between documentary and fiction. His graduate work at Harvard, mentored by Professor Tania Bruguera, unfolded through extensive fieldwork in Tangier, Morocco, with clandestine migrant communities navigating the Mediterranean crossing, culminating in a trans-media performance of image, sound, and text, curated at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

Currently, Khandekar collaborates with FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory, headed by Malkit Shoshan), the International Organization for Migration, and the UN Peace-building Fund in Mauritania, developing spatial strategies and policy scenarios around climate, peace, and security in M’Bera Camp at the Mali–Mauritania border, and the larger Sahel region. In parallel, his collaboration with the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs produced a visual and sonic installation confronting nuclear activism, gendered violence, and the speculative roles of art, design, and machine learning in imagining survivable futures.

Before joining Harvard, Khandekar conducted mobile ethnographic research along the trans-Himalayan Salt-Trade Route of the Nepal–Tibet borderlands, resulting in an exhibition and photo-essay that mapped indigenous nomadic infrastructures against encroaching forms of climate disruption and extra-state logistics.

Get in touch

pravahkhandekar@gsd.harvard.edu