Neil Potnis is an Indian American multimedia artist and researcher whose work investigates how visual media shapes political knowledge. He is the founder of Disruptve Studio, a nonpartisan media lab exploring visual culture and social movements within the South Asian diaspora.

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Potnis employs media arts and design as methods of sociological inquiry, working in documentary film, image-based research, and interactive design. He holds an MSc in Computational Design Practices from Columbia GSAPP and a BS (Hons) in Arts and Entertainment Technologies from The University of Texas School of Design and Creative Technologies. Recent work was exhibited at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. He extends this interdisciplinary approach in his doctoral research in International and Transcultural Studies at Columbia University, where he theorizes social movements as sites of civic exposure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and visual media, his research examines how Desi youth organize around climate justice and inequality, and how they contend with the nationalist and neoliberal pressures that structure their political lives.

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Prior to his doctoral studies, Potnis was a Design Fellow at Columbia Entrepreneurship and Columbia World Projects, where he led social impact workshops for Obama Foundation Scholars. He has worked with several environmental and civic research labs, including labr, where he contributed to the development of the first climate registry oriented toward civic participation. Across these contexts, his practice moves between academic theory and public action, giving diasporic communities the visual and conceptual tools to contest dominant political narratives and imagine a more equitable future.