Originally from New Delhi, Nikita Maheshwary is a performance practitioner based in The Netherlands with over fifteen years of experience in choreography, dramaturgy, art education and artistic research. Her art inquiries lie at the nexus of gender, culture, and identity and through her performances, writings, exhibits and curation work, she is deeply invested in telling stories of plurality, female agency, forms of marginalisation and class divide.In her performance work, Nikita blends movement, silence, texts and new-age media, to invite the audience to participate in the creation of meaning and collective knowledge.
From 2016 – 2018, Nikita worked as the programmer and festival director at Natya Ballet Centre, New Delhi facilitating the development of contemporary and subversive artistic practices, and, bringing to the fore non-institutionalised and marginalised dance theatre forms of the Subcontinent. Since 2018, also as a research fellow at THIRD, DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam (2019 – 2022), she is engaged in her long-term practice-based research project Naachne-wali: The Dancing Girl. The artistic research, till date, has led to one lecture performance ‘Umrao&Me’ (2018), a collective reading performance ‘Me&You: In a Dialogue’ (2020) and a publication ‘Dear You, Yours Lovingly Me’ (2022). Recently, in association with DansBrabant, she was involved in two European dance projects: Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance (2021 – 2022) and Performing Gender – Dancing in your shoes (2021 – 2023).
Currently, she works as an independent choreographer, teaches artistic research and dramaturgy at the Circus Department and Dance Department, Fontys Academy of Arts, Tilburg and serves as the board member of dance company The100Hands. In 2023-2024, with trans-disciplinary performance company MOVEDBYMATTER/Kasper Vandenburghe (BE) she is working as a dramaturg for circus odyssey DAR.
Nikita lives with her son and partner in the green province of Noord-Brabant and shares serious love for slowly brewed coffee and unhurried research&process orientated performance projects.
for CV, click here. for press & media, click here.
