Sarnath Banerjee (b. 1972) is a visual artist and an author of graphic literature. Banerjee's work employs a surreal style as he journeys between history, fiction, and the quotidian. Till date Banerjee has authored five books of graphic fiction, beginning with Corridor (Penguin Books, 2004).
Banerjee’s ongoing exhibition Critical Imagination Deficit (2025) for the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art includes multimedia work combining drawings and audio. Recently, his immersive graphic exhibition The Daily Melancolony of a Heartburn City was displayed at 24 Jor Bagh, Delhi. Banerjee’s solo exhibition, The Spectral Times, explored the idea of introducing sound into comics, and took place at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (2019). In collaboration with historians, he has produced Liquid History of Vasco Da Gama for the Kochi Biennial (2014) and The Poona Circle, a series of vandalised history textbooks, for the Pune Biennale (2017). For Frans-Hals museum, he produced I Got Ginger; a series of drawings and text that proposed the making of an ‘insubordinate history text book on Dutch colonialism (2017). His billboard series, Gallery of Losers, commissioned by Frieze Projects East, for the 2012 London Olympics, was widely displayed in East London. In 2016, he was commissioned over 80 murals by Deutsche Bank for their new offices in Canary Wharf.
Banerjee also co-founded the award-winning publishing house Phantomville that brought together reporters and comic-book artists to produce works of visual journalism. His column, The Enchanted Geography, was run by a national newspaper in India. Banerjee has received the Belknap fellowship from the history department of Princeton, 2019 and the CAST fellowship, MIT, 2019, developing the idea of theatrical lectures. Last year, he received the Berlin senate grant to write a book on his migrational experience.
He is a visiting professor at IIT ( Bombay, Jodhpur, Gandhinagar) and Munjal University, Delhi. He is also a guest professor at the University of Arts ( UdK), Berlin. He is currently working on an illustrated book on mosquitoes and how it challenged the British empire, along with other anticolonial insects like locusts and white ants for University of Reading.