Originally from New Delhi, Nikita Maheshwary is a performance practitioner based in The Netherlands with two decades 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 that explores the agency and representation of the performing female body through performance, dramaturgy and archival inquiry. 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). Alongside, in association with DansBrabant, Nikita was involved as a choreographer 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 the Artistic & Curriculum Lead for the Bachelor Choreography (BACH) at Fontys Academy of the Arts and is part of the core leadership team of Master Choreography COMMA (a joint programme of FAA x Codarts). She continues to work independently across dance and circus contexts, and serve as a board member of dance companies Vloeistof and The100Hands.
Nikita lives with her husband and two children in the green province of Noord-Brabant and shares serious love for slowly brewed coffee and unhurried research&process orientated performance projects.
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