Bio & press kit
Amar C. Bakshi
Amar C. Bakshi is a Brooklyn-based artist, entrepreneur, and institutional strategist who creates new ways for people to connect across difference.
In 2014 he painted a shipping container gold, filled it with life-size real-time video, and connected it to an identical room on the other side of the world. That became Shared Studios, which has since linked more than a million people through over 100 Portals across 42 countries — in Times Square and Herat, in refugee settlements in Jordan and Uganda, in Milwaukee and Gaza City. Portals have hosted Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Malala Yousafzai alongside refugees, students and neighbours meeting for the first time. Partners have included the United Nations, the Smithsonian, Google, NASA and the Obama Foundation. PBS made a documentary about it.
He co-led the Portals Policing Project with Tracey Meares at Yale and Vesla Weaver at Johns Hopkins, turning the Portals into a listening instrument: residents of fourteen heavily policed neighbourhoods across six cities talked to each other rather than to researchers, producing more than 850 conversations — at the time the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of policing in America assembled.
The work split as prototypes became infrastructure. The presence technology behind the Portals became Noro, which brings life-size presence to the workplace. He is co-founder and chief creative officer of Andus Labs, which builds the organisational readiness that lets AI investment actually deliver, for clients including Google, Moody's and Notre Dame. He is a partner at Portfolio, a special projects studio for democracy operating under Allied, incubating civic and cultural experiments that could not exist inside conventional institutions. And he co-leads New Social Forms at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, where he is an artist and entrepreneur in residence.
He continues to make work. Media Diet, an immersive installation co-created with Heidi Boisvert, rebuilds the living rooms of three real Americans and plays the same news story through three incompatible realities; it opened at Twenty Summers in Provincetown. Earlier, The Legal Medium — a symposium he founded at Yale — examined artists who use law itself as a creative material, and produced published legal and academic work on art, law and technology.
He came to this from journalism and government. As a reporter at The Washington Post he travelled through a dozen countries asking people how they saw America, and covered race and identity during the 2008 presidential campaign. He was managing editor of CNN's Global Public Square with Fareed Zakaria. At the United States Mission to the United Nations he served as special assistant to Ambassador Susan Rice, including on the U.S. response to the H1N1 pandemic. In Zimbabwe he spent a year researching how a government took control of the culture in order to control the media.
He holds an AB from Harvard, an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and a JD from Yale Law School. He is a Truman Scholar, a Soros Scholar, and a Fellow of the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute. He holds nine U.S. patents. He serves on the board of Refounding America, the Board of Governors of St. Albans School, and the steering committee of the YLS Alumni Strengthening Democracy Network.
Short bio
For programmes and introductions · 80 words
Amar C. Bakshi is a Brooklyn-based artist and entrepreneur who creates new ways for people to connect across difference. He founded Shared Studios, whose gold Portals have linked more than a million people across 42 countries, and co-leads New Social Forms at MIT. He is co-founder and chief creative officer of Andus Labs and a partner at Portfolio, a special projects studio for democracy. He previously reported for The Washington Post and was managing editor of CNN's Global Public Square.
One line
For panels and bylines
Amar C. Bakshi creates new ways for people to connect across difference — through Shared Studios, Noro, Andus Labs, Portfolio, and New Social Forms at MIT.
Headshots
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Common questions
For journalists, curators and funders
What is a Portal?
A Portal is a gold shipping container fitted with life-size, real-time video. You walk in alone, the door closes, and a stranger somewhere else in the world stands in front of you at full height. There is no headset and no screen to hold — the far room simply appears to continue into yours.
How many people have used one?
More than a million people since 2014, across more than 100 Portals in 42 countries. Sites and Portals are not the same count: some cities have had several Portals appear and come down over the years, which is why the figure is given in Portals rather than locations.
What is the gold book?
Every Portal held a gold book and a gold pen, and visitors wrote in it after their conversation. The archive holds 1,467 transcribed entries. They are the primary record of what actually happened inside the Portals, in the visitors' own handwriting.
What is New Social Forms?
A translational research initiative at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, where Amar is Founding Co-Lead. It studies the forms teams already run — the standup, the all-hands, the 1:1 — and asks what they should become now that AI systems sit inside them. Year one is about teams.
What is Portfolio?
A special-projects studio for democracy, taking civic ideas from concept to operating entity in weeks. Most of what it makes is launched by someone else and spun out to stand on its own.
What is Noro?
Life-size video walls that connect distant offices as if the two rooms were one. It is the Portal idea rebuilt for everyday work rather than public art, and it has won AV Technology Best of Show at InfoComm 2026, ISE 2026 and ISE 2025.
What was the Portals Policing Project?
A study run with Tracey Meares at Yale and Vesla Weaver at Johns Hopkins that turned the Portals into a listening instrument. Residents of fourteen heavily policed neighbourhoods across six cities talked to each other rather than to researchers, producing more than 850 conversations.
Is he available for talks and advising?
Yes — keynotes and moderated conversations, organisational experiments built around a live challenge, public installations, and longer-term advising or governance work. The contact page is the way in.