Project: The Body Remembers the Mountain: Kutiyattam’s Kailasodharanam https://brmproject.com
Current Writing: South Asian Disability and Deaf Theatres (forthcoming January 2025); “From Kutiyattam’s Kailasodharanam to In the Blue Houses Dream the Mountains.”
Current Art Project: “Towards a Different Earth: Accessible Eco-Theatres for New Audiences”

PROFILE

An Indian-American and hard-of-hearing choreographer, filmmaker, poet, educator, and Performance Studies scholar, the Founding Director of Folded Paper Dance and Theatre Limited (Hong Kong; Seattle; India 2009-2024), Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren is launching Wild Studios Consulting & Creative Productions, committed to the development of new transdisciplinary practices for our shared futures. She has authored numerous works on performance, disability, ecology, and heritage; produced conferences, symposia, interactive installations, and community events; taught a wide range of Interdisciplinary Studies courses and facilitated workshops and professional development training programmes; and created, choreographed, and directed more than 100 performances in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Her methodology, a combination of ethnography, experimental writing, dance arts, and design practices, critical theory, and storytelling, focuses on how the multisensory can inform a future-looking approach to accessible cultural heritage practices and arts for all through both live and virtual platforms as it expands our capacities to listen to each other and to the earth. She has received numerous awards, including a Citizen’s Diplomacy Action Fund Award (June-November 2024); Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar Award (Kerala, India: 2022-2023; Kerala, India: 2017-2018); Hong Kong Arts Development Council Project Grant (2021); Design Trust (Hong Kong: 2022; 2016-2017); Barbican Art School Lab Fellowship (London: 2012); Co-editor/Editor of Theatre Topics (2007-2011); NEH Summer Institute (Disability Studies, 2000); DAAD Award (Disability and the Legacy of Eugenics, 2004); and Artistic Residencies in Middle Tennessee State University (2012); Orissa, India (2011); and Turin, Italy (2010).

She is the author of Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theatre; the lead-editor of The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game; and former editor of Theatre Topics. Her current writing projects include South Asian Disability and Deaf Theatres (under contract with Routledge); Ensembles of innovation; “The Body Remembers the Mountain: From Kutiyattam’s Kailasodharanham to In the Blue Houses Dream the Mountains,” and “The Komagata Maru Incident: Afro-Asian Futurisms.”

With a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU, Kochhar-Lindgren earned her MFA in Dance from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro; her Certificate in Movement Analysis from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York; an MALS from Wesleyan University (CT); and an undergraduate degree in psychology from Antioch College (Yellow Springs). Before moving in other directions, she was tenured as Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington: Bothell, where she served as both the Co-Director of the Cultural Studies Collective and the Director of the Chancellor’s 2013 Innovation Forum.

COURSES TAUGHT

• CLIT 7023: Ecological Imagination in Literary and the Visual Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU