The Dancers:
Sigma Satabdhi Pradhan has been practicing and performing Odissi under the guidance of Guru Smt. Madhulita Mohapatra, the Artistic Director and teacher at Nrityantar Academy of Performing Arts, Bangalore, India. Simultaneously she has also been training in a multitude of dance forms like Jazz and Western Contemporary dance styles.
Sigma has been a part of numerous dance productions in India, and here in the States, and continues to hone her craft with DXS - a five-member desi fusion crew based in Chicago.
Harini Nilakantan has been practicing and studying Bharatanatyam since the age of four and is the current student of Guru Smt. Roja Kannan, founder and director of Bharathanatyalaya, Chennai, India. Harini has been a part of numerous productions with Bharathanatyalaya in India, and has also branched out to explore and learn other dance styles such as Afrobeat, waacking, and styles that fall under hip-hop.
She currently dances with The MOD Project - A desi fusion dance crew based in Chicago and is a member of DXS alongside Sigma.
The Poet:
Dipika Mukherjee’s newest poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2022. She is also the author of The Palimpsest of Exile (2009), and The Third Glass of Wine (2015). Her poetry appears in publications around the world, including RHINO, PostColonial Text, World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review and she won the Liakoura Prize for Poetry in 2016. She is the recipient of a 2022 Esteemed Artist Award (DCASE) from the City of Chicago and she teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School at the University of Chicago.
Mukherjee’s debut novel, Ode to Broken Things, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and her second novel, Shambala Junction, won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction. She earned her Ph.D. in English (sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University.
The Videographer:
Ji-Hoon Jang is a multimedia artist working with video, hand-drawn animations, and illustrations. He creates both traditional narrative short movies and experimental short videos that explore the mundane at different speeds, and scales.
Ji-Hoon earned his BFA in Film, Video, and New Media Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. He was born in Seoul, Korea, and lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Poet Dipika Mukherjee recites as dancers Sigma Satabdhi Pradhan and Harini Nilakantan metamorphose poetry from an auditory to a visual experience with their Odissi and Bharatanatyam inspired dance compositions.
