Photography, Performance art & Theatre

Experiments in memory, place, embodiment and storytelling across analogue photography and the stage.

I have moved between photography, theatre, performance and therapeutic practice for much of my creative life. These forms have never felt entirely separate to me. Each has shaped how I understand the body, memory, relationship and the stories we carry — and each has deeply influenced who I have become as a creative arts therapist.

Analogue photography taught me to slow down and notice. Theatre taught me to inhabit a story rather than simply describe it. Performance taught me to work with the body itself as material — with gesture, presence, movement, silence and relationship. And therapeutic practice taught me another kind of attention: how to stay with what emerges when a person is given enough space to encounter themselves.

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experiments with analogue photography – selected photographs

Andretta Valley, Himachal Pradesh
(Holga, B/W Film)

Andretta Valley, Himachal Pradesh
(Canon Analogue SLR)

Bijapur, Karnataka
(Canon Analogue SLR)

The matchbox train, chicago, Illinois
(Canon Analogue SLR)

Her, Pune
(Canon Analogue, SuperNova)

Auroville, Tamil Nadu
(Lomography Super Sampler)

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selected photography exhibitions around the world

‘I Dream With My Eyes Open, I Close My Eyes To See’
Ann arbor, michigan

I Dream With My Eyes Open, I Close My Eyes To See gathered visual snippets of Ann Arbor as I encountered it—as an outsider, and as one of the only Indian students in the department. The photographs lingered on the city’s small details and its vastness: quiet streets, passing bodies, fragments of architecture, changing seasons, and the sprawling American skies that seemed to stretch far beyond the scale of the life I had known before.

Shot on Lomography Super Sampler, Holga, and Canon analogue SLR cameras, the work became a way of looking at distance, belonging, and perception—how a place begins to enter you before you fully understand your place within it. Paired with poetry, the images held both wonder and estrangement, tracing the experience of seeing a new landscape while remaining conscious of the gaze, history, and cultural memory one brings into it.

Exhibited at the University of Michigan School of Theatre, Music and Dance, Ann Arbor

Shot on Lomography Super Sampler, Holga &
Canon Analogue SLR

that calcutta december
mumbai, india

That Calcutta December gathered fragments of Kolkata as I encountered it through its streets—in movement, in noise, in weather, in appetite. The photographs lingered on the city’s density and intimacy: tram lines, hand-painted signs, yellow taxis, crowded crossings, winter light, roadside food, old buildings, market stalls, and the constant choreography of people moving through one another. What stayed with me most was the sensory excess of the city; the smell of frying food and damp stone, the sound of traffic and conversation, the colour of fruit, fabric, rust, smoke and afternoon sun.

Shot on analogue film, the work became a way of holding onto a city that seemed impossible to contain in a single frame. The grain, blur, overexposure and unpredictability of film mirrored the experience of walking through Kolkata itself: layered, imperfect, immediate and alive. That Calcutta December was an attempt to remember how it felt to be inside the city—to gather its sights, smells and sounds into a series of fleeting visual impressions before they disappeared.

parvathamma, the spice seller
bengaluru, india

The market is a breathing, murmuring, living organism. It calls out to me. Hands disappear into curry powder. Paper exchanges hands. Dog-eared notes are counted and folded. Turmeric, chilli and dust leave their stains. Between rounds of tea and generous fistfuls of cashews, I travel with Parvathamma through the pockets of her memory.

Parvathamma sold spices in one of the many lanes of K. R. Market, Bangalore—a single life unfolding inside this enormous, restless body of commerce. One morning, I pointed a camera towards her world. She did not refuse.

For a week, I followed the rhythms of her life: watching her work, listening to her stories, moving through the market beside her, and eventually staying with her for a night. Being her shadow never seemed to trouble her.

“You do your work and I will do mine,” she told me.

There was something about that sentence that defined the project. I was there to look, but she refused to become simply an object of looking. Her life continued around the presence of my camera: bargaining, weighing spices, drinking tea, remembering, laughing, working. The photographs became less about capturing her and more about witnessing the parallel lives that briefly intersect when one person is permitted to enter another’s everyday world.
Once, I offered her money.
She refused.
“Invite me to your wedding,” she said instead.

Parvathamma is a photographic essay created as part of a larger project on Public Spaces and Pedagogy. It is a record of my encounter with her—of what I noticed, what she chose to reveal, and what inevitably remained outside the frame.

K. R. Market, Bangalore
Exhibited at Gallery Samuha, Bangalore

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Performance art & Theatre

THE BODY BECOMES a MEDIUM of social justice

Theatre changed the way I understood society.

A painting or a photograph can contain a gesture. On stage, you have to inhabit it. My work across theatre and performance has moved through gender, sexuality, queerness, memory, abuse, power and the stories we learn to perform about ourselves.

Through physical theatre, improvisation, satire and collaborative performance, I became interested in what happens when an inner experience is given a body — when emotion becomes gesture, when identity becomes performance, and when an audience becomes part of the encounter. These ways of working have profoundly shaped me as a creative arts therapist. The body is not simply something I later added to psychological practice. Movement, image, performance and embodied storytelling have always been among the languages through which I understand human experience.

Sometimes we speak a story. Sometimes we make it. Sometimes we have to move through it.

Performance:

“She’s too much”

Narratives of an “Intense” Woman (of color)
Chicago

Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago

Who is an intense person? Who is an intense woman? Does gender shape who gets read as excessive, emotional, difficult or simply too much? Who gets to apply the label — and who has to live inside it?

This interactive performance brought together psychology, theatre and comedy to play with these questions through the heightened world of reality television.

Each performer embodied a different caricature of (pseudo)feminism, exaggerating its contradictions while drawing the audience into a deliberately ridiculous, hilarious, outrageous debate: Reality TV: A Guilty Pleasure, or Just Guilty?

Through satire, performance and audience participation, She’s Too Much played with the politics of intensity — particularly the ways women are watched, judged and asked to regulate how much of themselves they are allowed to be.

Performance:
manifesting rage – intimacy in a cold land

The Aut Bar
Ann Arbor, Michigan

A series of independent performance-art pieces developed under New York-based performance artist Holly Hughes explored the relationship between autobiography, embodiment, and theatrical form.

The work began with questions of translation: how does a private memory become a public narrative? What happens when language is stripped away and the body becomes the primary site of storytelling? Through movement, gesture, repetition, silence, spatial composition, and fragmented text, these pieces examined how lived experience can be reshaped into performance without losing its emotional complexity. Rather than treating theatre as representation alone, the work approached the stage as a place where memory could be re-entered, distorted, witnessed, and re-authored.

The pieces moved between personal story and performance art, often using the body as both subject and archive. They asked how shame, desire, identity, grief, humour, and contradiction live physically—and how an audience reads meaning through posture, rhythm, proximity, stillness, and interruption before a story is ever fully explained.

Performance:
91.27% Gayboy & Paradoxia

Snippets from Queer Adolescence in India
mumbai, india

Two performance art pieces, created for the Queer Ink India Festival, 91.27% gayboy and Paradoxia navigate several spaces, those of childhood, those of memory, those of the ‘taboo’ and those that explore what it means to be Indian and what it means to be queer, through the medium of physical theatre and poetry.

Queer Ink is India’s leading publishing house for Queer material. They host the ‘Queer Ink Safe Spaces’ event to build safe spaces for the queer community and allies to bond, share notes, and engage in community art making.

In collaboration with performance artist, Vikrant Dhote.

Performance:
Gender Shadow, Theatre of the Oppressed

Auroville, International Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed Conference, Kolkata

Dir: Evan Hastings

This piece on shadow puppetry and gender justice, directed by Evan Hastings, was one of my earliest explorations of performance as a tool for collective witnessing, interruption, and healing.

At the heart of the work was a simple but enduring idea: the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Shadow Liberation used hand-crafted visual storytelling, shadow theatre, and participatory performance to examine gender violence not only as an external social problem, but as something carried through silence, conditioning, fear, complicity, and inherited scripts of power.

Drawing from Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre, the audience was not asked to remain passive. They were invited into the scene itself—to step on stage, intervene, improvise, and test different responses to moments of oppression. The work resisted neat solutions. Instead, it placed trust in the intelligence of the collective: in what might emerge when a community is asked not simply to observe injustice, but to enter into relationship with it.

What stayed with me most was the language of shadow itself. A shadow is not separate from the body that casts it. It appears in relation to light. That became an important psychological metaphor for me long before I formally integrated depth psychology into my clinical work. I began to understand that violence, shame, desire, fear, and power often operate through what remains unspoken or unseen—and that bringing these forces into awareness can change the way we relate to ourselves and to one another. My training with Evan Hastings became an early foundation for the work I would later develop in psychotherapy, writing, and retreats. The question has remained remarkably consistent: what becomes possible when we stop exiling the shadow and learn instead to meet it, witness it, and bring it into conscious dialogue?

Performance:
Rizwaan

Ranga Shankara, Bangalore
Dir: Abhishek Majumdar, Indian Ensemble