Department of Transformation
Department of Transformation (D🌍T) is an artist-organized group founded by designer, author, and educator Prem Krishnamurthy that prototypes new formats for togetherness, learning, and collective healing. Through workshops, events, publications, and commissions (+ karaoke!), we support others in their own processes of change. We believe that by transforming the arts, we can transform ourselves, our communities, and our world.
P! Krishnamurthy, Founder & Director
Prem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) explores how art & design can be agents of transformation for individuals, communities, and institutions. His multidisciplinary work manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops (+ karaoke!). He currently runs Department of Transformation, an artist-organized group that prototypes new modes of togetherness and mutual learning, as well as Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design consultancy.
He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019. In 2022, Domain published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters. In 2024, KW, König Books, and Kunsthal Gent will publish Past Words, an anthology of his writing from 2009–2024.
In addition to leading strategic projects with artists, cultural institutions, and nonprofit organizations across the world, he has curated several large-scale public exhibitions. These include Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the 2022 edition of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Our Silver City, 2094 at Nottingham Contemporary; and Ministry of Graphic Design in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York.
Sam Rauch, Curator
Sam Rauch is an independent curator and producer of artist projects, primarily in public space. Since 2007, he has collaborated closely with some of the world’s leading artists to realize their most ambitious exhibitions, commissions, and site-specific installations. In the course of Director-level roles at Public Art Fund, the New Museum, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Madison Square Park, he has partnered with artists ranging from emerging to world-renowned, produced dynamic new works in virtually every conceivable medium and scale, and engaged diverse publics in New York City and globally, in contexts ranging from traditional museum and gallery spaces to public streets and parks, iconic urban landmarks, and important civic sites. His research focuses on prototyping experimental and interdisciplinary collaborative art practices that foster kinship, reciprocity, care, and repair within and between the human and more-than-human realms.
