Dancing between worlds
On a January evening in Chennai, as lights dimmed at Dakshinamurthy Hall, Shriya Srinivasan stepped onto the Bharatanatyam stage with an unexpected subject: climate change. Vivarta, her dance-drama for Shri Kalaa Mandir, traced cosmic balance to ecological rupture through movement rather than explanation. “We wanted to use rasa to sensitise people to climate change,” she says. Choreographed with her mother and guru, Sujatha Srinivasan—who appeared as Mother Earth—the work premiered in Cleveland in 2019 and is now touring India.
Raised in suburban Cleveland, Shriya trained under her Chennai-born mother and completed her arangetram in 2008. In parallel, she built a career in science: a PhD at Harvard-MIT, postdoctoral work at MIT, and now an assistant professorship at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where she directs the BIONICS Lab. Her research has been recognised by Forbes, MIT Technology Review, and the Lemelson-MIT Prize.
She rejects talk of “dual careers.” Both worlds, she says, demand discipline and feed one another. Dance sharpened how she teaches and leads, and even shaped her research questions. Science, in turn, made her a more analytical dancer. In 2015, she co-founded Anubhava Dance Company with Joshua George, presenting works alongside traditional margams while engaging themes like disability, technology, and the climate crisis. For Shriya, Bharatanatyam is not a museum piece but a living system. “I aim to carry forward the bani I received,” she says.