Anjali Deshmukh
Anjali is an MJN co-founder and artist, game designer, and writer dedicated to creating for, with, and in community in public spaces and designing systems that strive to make justice normal.
Blessings include an Asian American Arts Alliance grant on community healing and care; a City Artist Corps grant; commissioning grant and individual artist grant via the Queens Council on the Arts, resulting games on the Brooklyn Grange LIC Rooftop Farm and Sunnyside’s Bliss Plaza; and installations at the Brooklyn Museum, Dumbo Arts Festival, Digital Games Research Association, and Propelify Innovation Festival.
2024 Street Work: what Ernest & Anjali did
2024 Street Work: how it felt
More
Anjali was also named an Award Finalist (2nd Place) for SXSW Eco’s 2016 Place By Design Competition and worked with the Asian American Arts Alliance (A4), to gather voices of Asian American artists and NYC residents to inform the City’s first-ever cultural plan. She got her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2003-5) and was grateful to receive a Fulbright Scholarship in 2006.
With Purvi Shah, she creates interactive art as circlefor, a collaboration reflecting on how we inhabit the sacred and how art can be of service to healing.
She's currently part-time Senior Advisor, Impact Accountability, at Prime Coalition, a nonprofit channeling capital to deep impact climate solutions, and serves on the leadership team for the New York Climate Reality grassroots group. Previously, she was VP of Knowledge & Communications at Mission Investors Exchange; Director of Communications for JUST Capital; and Director of Knowledge & Communications for Nonprofit Finance Fund.
Anjali has a neurological disability that shapes how she sees, hears, and labors in the world — and her perspective of system failure and justice. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, the unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape and Matinecock peoples. Anjali cares for JH public spaces as a regular current volunteer / social sculpture artist for the 34th Avenue Open Street Coalition and past volunteer for Diversity Plaza.
