Kaustavi Sarkar

Kaustavi Sarkar is a professional Odissi soloist, performing and touring the eastern Indian traditional art form for the past two decades. In a recent review of a February 2025 performance in New Delhi, India, critic Ashish Mohan Khokar wrote that in her dance “one saw clarity of poses and emotional range.”

Sarkar investigates virtuosity in dance-theater as fostered in traditional Indian aesthetics through her research on choreography and creative processes. She has commissioned works from female choreographers Ananya Chatterjea, Rohini Dandavate, Aruna Mohanty, and Maya Kulkarni to research and write about the creative process in South Asian aesthetics. 

Sarkar has published journal-length inquiries in International Journal of Screendance, Choreographic Practices, Journal on Dance Education, Performance Research etc. Her book Dance Technology and Social Justice: Individual and Collective Emancipation Through Embodied Techniques (McFarland, 2024) has been featured in Dance Studies Association’s 2024-2025 Reading Seminars. She is working on another monograph, Shaping S Curves: Choreographic Process in Odissi, which is currently in contract with University of North Carolina Press.

Sarkar is a leader in her field and serves as a Regional Director for the American College Dance Association (ACDA) mid-Atlantic region. Her research institute, “Dance and Community,” brings artists, educators, and scholars together towards systemic change and has been recognized by ACDA as an integrative medium for diasporic artists. She is the founding member as well as business manager for the journal South Asian Dance Intersections. She is also the founder of the Odissi Odyssey conference held annually at UNC Charlotte, which is the largest gathering of Odissi artists outside India.

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 Journal 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.