Kaustavi Sarkar

Kaustavi Sarkar, Associate Professor, is a dancer-choreographer-educator-scholar. Sarkar has been performing and teaching Odissi, an Indian classical dance form from eastern India, for over a decade. Currently, she is the Artistic Director of an India-based organization dedicated to Indian classical dance called Kaustavi Movement Center 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 has performed in numerous dance festivals and presented her scholarly research in conferences in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Her research spans across the fields of South Asian Dance Studies, Practice-as-Research, Arts Entrepreneurship, and Digital Humanities embedded in critical cultural theory. She employs entrepreneurial measures for building a dance fraternity since her teaching, choreography, and writing builds conversations across academe, performance, and business. Her choreography was featured in American College Dance Association East-Central Conference at Kent State University in 2017.

Sarkar holds a Ph.D. in Dance Studies (focus on Digital Humanities) from The Ohio State University (2017).  She also holds an M.S. in Economics with Minor in Finance, Texas A&M University (2006).

Select Publications:

S Manjon, Sonia B. S, Akhona Ndzuta, Chloé Greene, Kaustavi C. Sarkar, Nicholas N. Flores, and Wen Guo. “A Transdisciplinary Approach to Mentoring Through Collaboration.” Visual Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 3, 2016, pp. 353-367.

Sarkar, Kaustavi and Torsa Ghosal. “Bar Bar Sakhi: In Search of the Queer Temporalities of Sakhya.” Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical Solidarities in a Global Perspective, edited by Debanuj Dasgupta, Niharika Benerjea, Rohit K. Dasgupta, and Jamie M. Grant, University of Chicago Press, 2016, pp. 56-89.

Sarkar, Kaustavi. “Ananlyzing Ananya Chatterjea’s Mohona” Scripting Dance in Contemporary India, edited by Varun Gulati and Mythili Anoop, Lexington Books, 2016, pp. 139-157.

—. “A Difficult Whole: Reading Ananya Chatterjea’s Mohona, Estuaries of Desire.” Research in Dance Education, vol. 16, no. 3, 2015, pp. 10-28.

—. “Queer Temporal Twisting of Acceptable Indigeneity: Concurrence of Odissi, Mahari, and Gotipua Performance.” Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, 2015.

— and Paul Boyce. “Mahari Then and Now: Queering Performativity in Odissi,” edited by Contemporary Women’s Writing in India, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 83-79.

—. “The Frigid Description of the Dancing Body.” Performance Research, vol. 18, no. 6, 2013, pp. 38-45.