Shweta Saraswat

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Shweta Saraswat is a company performer and board member at the Indian Performing Art Center and faculty member at the Kathak Kala Academy. She received her Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from the department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA, where her ethnographic research focused on the relationship between diasporic identity and Kathak dance in Los Angeles and London. She started learning Kathak as a child in 1998 from Guru Rachana Upadhyay, one of the first resident practitioners of Kathak in Los Angeles, and has trained continuously in the Lucknow gharana of Kathak with her ever since. Shweta has presented both her dance work and academic work at venues such as the Getty Museum, the School for Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Academia Sinica in Taipei, the Dance Studies Association annual conference, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, UC Riverside, and Cal Arts. Shweta’s original writing on traditional arts and identity has been published in the Journal of American Folklore and the anthology Fifty Contemporary Choreographers by Routledge.