Shruthi (she/her) is a first year Ph.D student in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies in UW-Madison. With an academic background in International Politics and Journalism, she often finds herself pursuing research interests at the intersections of art and politics. Her previous work, as researcher and curator, with independent arts collectives in Bangalore, India has led her to investigate the complex dynamics of caste and labour in India’s creative economies.
Through her doctoral project, Shruthi is interested in exploring the counter-cultural aesthetics of contemporary Dalit and anti-caste theatre in India. She hopes to track the ideational antecedents of their forms, methods, and idiomatic language in its messy entanglements with ‘classical’ Indian performance traditions and Hindu aesthetic philosophies to its present complications with capital and State.