About


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Kanta has authored numerous works on performance, disability, ecology, and heritage; produced conferences, symposia, interactive installations, and community events; taught a wide range of Interdisciplinary Studies courses and facilitated workshops and professional development training programs; and created, choreographed, and directed numerous performances in the US, Europe, and Asia. Her methodology--a combination of ethnography, experimental writing, dance arts, and design practices, critical theory, and storytelling--focuses on how the multisensory informs her future-looking approach to accessible arts and cultural heritage practices. She has received many awards, including a Citizen’s Diplomacy Action Fund (CDAF) Award (Kerala, India, 2024); two Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar Awards (Kerala, India: 2022-2023; Kerala, India: 2017-2018); a Hong Kong Arts Development Council Project Grant (2021); a Design Trust Grant (Hong Kong: 2016-2017); a Barbican Art School Lab Fellowship (London: 2012); Co-editor/Editor of Theatre Topics (2007-2011); an NEH Summer Institute (Disability Studies, 2000); a DAAD Award (Disability and the Legacy of Eugenics, 2004); and Artistic Residencies in Middle Tennessee State University (2012); Orissa, India (2011); and Turin, Italy (2010).

She is the author of South Asian Disability and Deaf Theatres; 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 “The Body Remembers the Mountain: From Kutiyattam’s Kailasodharanham to In the Blue Houses Dream the Mountains,” “The Komagata Maru Incident: Afro-Asian Futurisms,” and “deaf Sound Arts”. 

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 (CMA) 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 an 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.

An Indian-American and hard-of-hearing choreographer, filmmaker, poet, educator, and Performance Studies scholar, the Founding Director of Folded Paper Dance and Theatre Limited (Hong Kong; Seattle; India. 2009-2024), Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren has launched Wild Studios Consulting & Creative Productions, committed to the development of new transdisciplinary practices for our shared futures. She is a Visiting Associate Professor in the School of Humanities; Adjunct Faculty in the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS), Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong.