Artist Bio

Chitra Vairavan is an artist, seeker, contemporary indian dancer/choreographer and educator born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (occupied Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee land) and culturally-grown as an artist in Mni Sota Makoce / Minnesota (on occupied Dakota Oyate land) for twenty years. With ancestral roots in Kandanur and Rayavaram, South India, she is immersed in Tamil/Thamizh culture and progressive politics in the U.S. Her embodied practice and experimental process is rooted in deep listening, spatial observation, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability and ancestral memory. Vairavan dances to heal and creates dance to help heal others. The aesthetic of her movement is through both yoga and contemporary Indian dance forms – mainly a mixture of training in Bharatanatyam, Odissi and Yorchha™.

Her creative labor and performance work earned her the 2015 Sage Award for Outstanding Performer, 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Dance, as well as being named “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine in 2017 among other honors. Her work has been funded by the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation.

Vairavan received a B.A. in Spanish Studies and Strategic Communication from the University of Minnesota and an M.A. in Leadership and Public Policy from the University of St. Thomas, while working as a legal assistant in their law school for a decade.

Present Moments (a chronology)

After working with mentor Eiko Otake, for her 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship, Vairavan began to create experimental dance works through site-specific and durational performance explorations. Her creative choices led her to receive the 2018 Naked Stages Fellowship for emerging choreographers/theatre artists, where she was mentored by Sharon Bridgforth and the team at Pillsbury House + Theatre. Vairavan currently experiments in transdisciplinary and collaborative artistic work between poetry, visual art and dance primarily. Read more about her work, One Removed in Fragments: Reflecting on Choreographers’ Evening 2018 and Meet the Artists of Choreographers’ Evening 2018.

Her more recent creative explorations led her to offer her own classes. In December 2019, Vairavan began sharing her performance methodology and creative thinking through a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color)-centered creative liberation practice, called Balance + Boundaries, for artists of all disciplines seeking to explore and expound on their movement practices within their own work. The series seeded an artist collective called The Vibrants in March 2020 over the pandemic. The Vibrants are a collective of women of color artists who center their liberation and rest. In 2020-2021, Vairavan received (and was humbled by) the recognition of Springboard for the Arts’ 20/20 Artist Fellowship. The (former) fellowship supports BIPOC and Native artists who are creating tools, pathways and systems of support for artists in their communities.

Over the pandemic, she has been on an extensive research and creation process in a series of fieldwork explorations exploring her roots and politics as an artist/seeker. Vairavan continues to teach, create and offer.

Contemporary Foundations (a reflection)

Vairavan was born in Milwaukee, WI (on occupied Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee land) and community-grown as an artist and cultural activist in Minneapolis, MN (on occupied Dakota land). She has been dancing since the age of two and her parents instilled in her the importance of her cultural and linguistic roots as a Tamil/Thamizh person from birth. She comes from a family of Thamizh educators, writers and poets. Art was a matter of survival in the American landscape from there. Her earlier dance teachers included Meena Baskaran and Hema Rajagopalan.

In 2004, Vairavan met her contemporary dance mentor, Dr. Ananya Chatterjea, and a fierce group of women artists of color, through which she became a founding member of Ananya Dance Theatre in her undergraduate years and beyond. She completed 14 seasons with the company from 2004-2015, earning her much recognition as an artist and principal dancer for many years. Vairavan would later explore experimental dance work further as a dance collaborator with Pramila Vasudevan’s Aniccha Arts since 2007.