An Indian-American and hard-of-hearing artist, educator, and Performance Studies scholar, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren is the Founding Director of Folded Paper Dance and Theatre Limited (Hong Kong). Having created, choreographed, and directed more than 100 performances in the US, Europe, and Asia, she is currently working with multiple partners on Sounding Bodies: Intermedia in Hong Kong (a Hong Kong Arts Development Council Project Grant, 2020-2021), which explores ecologies of urban, communal, and natural spaces as well how we might develop a different kind of hearing, seeing, and awareness in our time of crisis. At the Water’s Edge (Maryland Institute College of Art, 2019) focused on climate change is now being expanded into traveling workshops and portable performances in Hong Kong and India.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in 2017-2018 based at the Kerala Museum of Art and History in Kochi, India, Kochhar-Lindgren curated seminars, community gatherings, and research on Traveling Exchanges and Performing Heritage. Other awards include Traveling Architectures (Design Trust, Hong Kong, 2016-2017) and the Barbican Art School Lab Fellowship (London, 2012). She is the author of Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theatre; the lead-editor of The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game; and former editor of Theatre Topics. Her current writing projects include Theatre and Disability in India; Traveling Exchanges; Ensembles of innovation; and “The Komagata Maru Incident: Afro-Asian Futurisms.”
With a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU, Kochhar-Lindgren earned her MFA in Dance from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro; her Certificate in Movement Analysis from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York; an MALS from Wesleyan University (CT); and an undergraduate degree in psychology from Antioch College (Yellow Springs). Before moving in other directions, she was tenured as Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington: Bothell, where she served as both the Co-Director of the Cultural Studies Collective and the Director of the Chancellor’s 2013 Innovation Forum.
