ankita sharma

ankita sharma is an experimental performance artist invested in world-making where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. Their creations unpack systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is grungy, confrontational, and cheeky, a dance-horror, with physicality rooted in contemporary dance-theater and South Asian and African diasporic forms. They are guided by experimental impulses to iterate beyond what they know, obsessed with each project departing from the last. Storytelling, however, comes first, and Sharma’s stories ask for honesty, unpacking unspoken but overt inequities, focused on making large-scale deceptions of society digestible experiences that hold audiences accountable as agents in their own life.

Sharma’s work is being shown at venues across the US, including Denver Art Museum, Dixon Place, JACK, BASE, Abrons Arts Center, The Tank, University Settlement, and LaGuardia Performing Arts. They are in residence at BASE and GALLIM and have been a past MNE ECS Recipient, Performance Project Fellow, LEIMAY Incubator, and recipient of the Broadway League and Overton Memorial Award.

jagaana/Awaken/
In labor, Kali awakens to the demands of worship and is remade into an idol.
jagaana/Awaken/ is an excerpt from ankita sharma’s dhoka/Betrayal/, in which Kali’s ultimate power tips into destruction as Hinduism is colonized into propaganda for violence. 

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