Meet Our Contributors

Arushi Singh is a dance scholar, writer, educator, choreographer, and performer from New Delhi, now based in Los Angeles. Her award-winning research centers on the choreographic practices and cultural infrastructures of contemporary South Asia, bringing dance and performance studies into conversation with institutional theory and political economy. Across her scholarship, she is particularly interested in how artistic practices both take shape within and actively produce the institutional, social, and material conditions that make artistic life possible.

Her current writing develops the concept of instituting otherwise to examine the relationship between choreography, institution-building, and contemporary dance in India. Approaching institutions as dynamic, embodied, and relational formations rather than fixed organizational structures, this work considers how they are continually made and remade through artistic practice. In particular, she asks how choreographic practices of experimentation, collaboration, improvisation, and care can themselves become modes of instituting—producing infrastructures, publics, pedagogies, and collective worlds through which artistic life takes form. Bringing together archival research, ethnography, institutional analysis, and movement studies, her scholarship understands performance not only as an aesthetic practice but also as a way of making, negotiating, and reimagining cultural worlds.

Singh’s writing appears in Didaskalia, South Asian Dance Intersections, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, Dance Chronicle, Race & Yoga, and Tilt Pause Shift: Dance Ecologies in India, with a forthcoming essay in The Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis.

Her scholarly concerns extend into her work as an educator and editor. At Chapman University, she teaches dance history and theory, bringing embodied practice into conversation with critical and historical inquiry. She has previously taught at UCLA and the California Institute of the Arts and has delivered guest lectures at the University of Chicago, The Juilliard School, and Williams College. As Editor-in-Chief of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, she cultivates editorial and curatorial practices that are porous, collaborative, and responsive to the transdisciplinary and transcultural conversations shaping the field.

Singh holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA, an MPhil in Theatre and Performance Studies and an MA in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, as well as a BA in Economics.

Instagram: @sing_arushi

You can also listen to Arushi Singh’s PillowVoices podcast episode, “Fluid Roots and Resistance in Contemporary Indian Dance”.

Photo: Dhruv Malhotra