About
I am interested in musics and performances that transgress boundaries of some kind, whether race, language, genre, or nation. I examine these performances from both aesthetic and political perspectives, interrogating the motivations that go into the performative crossing of racial lines as well as the technical demands that inform these transgressions of genre. My 2025 dissertation, "Sounding the Hyphen: Cross-Cultural Performance in South Asian America," explores the affordances of these border crossings for diasporic practitioners of South Asian music, whose classical and fusion performance practices emerge as critical sites of identity formation and interracial dialogue. My course offerings include MUSI 23722 "Music and Mixture: Interracial Performance and the Politics of Appropriation" and MUSI 29926 “'The Master’s Tools': Agency and Resistance from Below" (Spring 2026).
I am a lifelong practitioner of Carnatic music and specialize as an accompanist for bharatanatyam. I have also trained extensively in Western classical music and jazz, and currently serve as the Artistic Director of The Amarkalam Project, a Chicago-based Indo-jazz performance ensemble. In 2025 I served as the Artist-in-Residence for the Princeton University Glee Club, where I drew on my ethnographic background in flamenco and cante to perform the American debut of Fabien Touchard's Una Canción de Guerra. As a scholar-practitioner, I am interested in questions of improvisation, embodiment, and intra-ensemble communication, as well as the transmission and pedagogy of oral traditions that do not fit neatly into Eurocentric modes of analysis. My work has been published in the Routledge edited volume Crossover, Exchange, Appropriation: Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom (2024).