KAUSTAVI SARKAR, Assistant Professor, is a dancer-choreographer-educator-scholar. Sarkar has been performing and teaching Odissi, for over a decade while pursuing a career in US academia. She has taught at Kenyon College and The Ohio State University (OSU) and holds a Ph.D. from OSU in Dance Studies with interdisciplinary research interests in digital humanities, cultural studies, queer studies, and religious studies.

Sarkar's first book ‘Dance Technology Social Justice: Individual and Collective Techniques of Emancipation’ published by McFarland Publishers explores the potential of Odissi in experimentation with dance-technology and as a mode of social justice.

She is working on a second monograph in contract with the University of North Carolina Press called ‘Shaping S Curves’ which explores the theory, practice, and philosophy of Odissi dance.

Sarkar is a leader in her field as the founder of the journal ‘South Asian Dance Intersections’ and serves as a Regional Director for American College Dance Association.

Dancer, choreographer, scholar, and curator MAYA KULKARNI is the creator of Shilpanatanam, a new dance vocabulary that adheres to the dramaturgical aesthetics of Natya Shastra but breaks from the strictures of conventional repertoire and movement rules. Maya has choreographed over 35 dance pieces in Shilpanatanam based on poetry, sculpture, and architecture that transcend Indian ethos and explore Greek and Chinese poetics. The purpose is to draw out the secular and universal themes within these art forms and transform the stories they tell into dancing metaphors and imagery.

Shilpanatanam is performed by several highly reputed professional artists who have presented them to great press notices. Maya Kulkarni’s current projects are Manikarnika, a 40-minute dance piece on the folk myths of Kashi, Surya Stuti based on Yogic asanas, and poems of Vidyapati, another Medieval literato, whose sensuous poetry rivals Jayadeva’s celebrated Gita Govindam.

ANUJ VAIDYA is an artist/educator whose praxis engages a diverse range of forms and strategies that include theater and performance, multi-media installation and story-telling, social practice, curatorial practice, arts education, and artivism. Deeply invested in collaboration, Vaidya seeks to break down the divide between artist and audience by engaging them not only as content consumers but also as co-creators through participatory processes. His work pays due attention to the material, social, and intellectual impacts of our storytelling and media technologies, reminding us that we must be attentive to both the footprint and the brain-print of the stories we tell. His project, Forest Tales, is a femi-queer SF eco-cinema retelling that swims in the South Asian Sitayana epic tradition. As a speculative cinema project, it not only narrates eco-tales at the horizon of the sixth extinction, but also reimagines the cinematic process/apparatus, revealing cinema as a corporeal and land-based practice. Learn more at: handspuncinema.wordpress.com

USHA SRINIVASAN is a cultural innovator and strategist who co-founded Mosaic America – a non-profit that aims to foster social cohesion and cultivate a sense of belonging in Silicon Valley. Under her leadership, Mosaic America has expanded its programming footprint to six Bay Area cities, activating public spaces with authentically inclusive cultural experiences such as the award-winning Mosaic Festival Silicon Valley.

Usha is a Senior Fellow at American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley. She serves on the Board of California Arts Advocates and Californians for the Arts. An alumna of Multicultural Arts Leadership Institute, Usha is a member of the Cultural New Deal Silicon Valley and the Greater Bay Area Arts and Cultural Advocacy Coalition. She has served on grants panels for National Endowment for the Arts, SVCreates, California Arts Council, and other major arts funders.

Prior to founding Mosaic America, Usha worked in the hi-tech industry for nearly fifteen years. She holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

NADHI THEKKEK is a dancer, choreographer, and the Artistic Director of Nava Dance Theatre. Nadhi uses the south Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam to navigate place, identity, and politics through the lens of her lived experience as a child of immigrants and an unapologetic South Asian, diasporic woman. She reimagines how bharatanatyam can serve marginalized narratives that need to occupy space in the US right now. Her nationally touring work “Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies” sources community interviews, historical texts, and poetry to explore the intersections of labor, agency, and belonging in our South Asian ancestry. Nadhi’s body of work has been supported through the NEFA National Dance Project, The MAP Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, and others.

Through Nava, Nadhi also produces and co-facilitates the Unrehearsed Artist Residency Program, where South Asian dancemakers create art that challenges the status quo. She is one of the co-founders of Varnam Salon and serves on the board of the Western Arts Alliance.

Nadhi has learned bharatanatyam from Guru Smt. Sundara Swaminathan (Kala Vandana Dance Company, San Jose) and Guru Smt. Padmini Chari (Nritya School of Dance, Houston). As of 2012, she has continued training under Guru Sri. A. Lakshmanaswamy (Chennai).

DEEPA MAHADEVAN is an artist scholar. She is a Bharatanatyam practitioner, researcher, teacher, choreographer, and curator. Her doctoral research in Performance studies the history of aesthetics in Bharatanatyam, through the vectors of caste, class, sexuality, gender and religion, between the 1930s till 2020.

She strives to explore, capture, and embody the potent energy of every emerging moment in a performance, setting it apart from pre-choreographed dances, which have significantly more predictable energy patterns. Her practice weighs heavily on improvisation and creating work 'with the audience' than 'at the audience.' She constantly strives to find space in her practice that celebrates spontaneity while dealing with uncertainty. Her research and method is excited about accepting any shift in an expected course of events as a prompt from the current moment to accept it and create with it. She is interested in exploring the continuum or the implicit dialog between a trained dancer’s body and the spontaneous dancer’s body.